The three components to the crisis are churn, aging, and the increasing predominance of births into disadvantaged households.

Churn

Yesterday the main release from Statistics New Zealand was Record net migration loss of New Zealand citizens. ” There was a record net migration loss of 44,700 New Zealand citizens in the September 2023 year. This net migration loss was made up of 26,400 migrant arrivals and 71,200 migrant departures.”

Today the main release was the National population estimates at 30 September 2023. Radio NZ reported at 1pm today that “New Zealand’s population has grown by almost three percent in the last year. Stats NZ has released its most recent population figures showing there are now 5.27 million people living in Aotearoa. For the year ending September 2023 the population grew by 138,100 people. Of that, the natural increase, the number of births minus deaths was 19,300 people, with the rest being made up of net migration.”

That gain of net migration was 118,800. A quick calculation tells us that the gain of non- New Zealand citizens was 163,500, in one 12-month period. 163,500 is 3.1% of Aotearoa New Zealand’s entire population. (If that continues, New Zealand will have 10 million people before 2050, with Māori plus New Zealand born Pakeha – tangata whenua and tangata tiriti – being as few as one-third of the total.)

New Zealand is perhaps the world’s most significant churn economy/nation, experiencing simultaneous record net emigration and record net immigration!! Multiculturalism will matter most. Though we have spent too much effort in recent years navel-gazing about biculturalism.

Aging

Here I will emphasise the role of historical births. In 2022 the age with the greatest number of deaths was 89. That’s people born in 1933, when births were close to a low for the last 100 years. The lowest three years were 1933 to 1935, with a total of 81,574 people born. From 1943 to 1945 there were 114,255 births From 1952 to 1954 there were 157,789 births. From 1961 to 1963 there were 194,931 births, a 139% increase compared to 1933‑1935. From 1970 to 1972 there were 189,725 births.

The number of people aged 87 to 89, will in fact be closer to three times higher in 2050 than it is in 2023, even if there is no further emigration or immigration. That’s because, in addition to the abovementioned 139% increase in births, New Zealand’s population grew substantially since the 1960s, with a significant amount of that net immigration being people born in that 1961 to 1963 period. (It’s also because of much higher infant mortality in the Depression years of the 1930s.) This coming population peak are people now in their early sixties; people who are already boosting New Zealand’s mortality statistics.

A significant number of the people reaching their late eighties in the 2030s and 2040s will be retired (ie no longer practicing) healthcare doctors, nurses, paramedics, and pharmacists.

It is most likely that there will not in fact be as many people in their late eighties in 2050 as my projections suggest. Many of the “late-boomers” will most likely died prematurely; I confidently predict that there will be a substantial fall in life expectancy over the next 25 years.

Births in disadvantaged households

It is not fashionable today to keep data about socio-economic disadvantage. Instead, we rely on two fashionable proxies for such disadvantage: Māori and Pasifika. A third useful proxy for disadvantage is ex-nuptial births.

Neither being Māori or Pasifika, nor giving birth ex-nuptially, are direct indicators of disadvantage; after all our Prime Minister last year gave birth ex-nuptially in 2018. Yet, all three of these birth measures correlate with disadvantage. And Aotearoa today has pockets of substantial disadvantage, much of it barely acknowledged.

I will note these statistics about 2022 births:

• 30,009 ex-nuptial births; highest since 2010 (31,236) and up by 1,461 since 2021
•  28,875 nuptial births; lowest since the 1930s, and down by 1,236 since 2021
• 12,948 births of Asian ethnicity; down from a peak of 13,188 in 2019
• 9,609 births of Pasifika ethnicity, highest since 2012 (9,897) and up by 645 since 2021
• 17,712 births of Māori ethnicity, highest since 2010 (18,459) and up by 570 since 2021

We should note that 2022 is the first year ever in Aotearoa New Zealand that ex-nuptial births exceeded nuptial births.

In 2050, those born in 2022 will be turning 28. Will they have the skills, education and training, and motivation to be providing high quality services to that huge cohort of people who will then be in their late eighties? Will it be acceptable if only the elite-elderly are able to afford an acceptable level of life-sustaining and life-enhancing services?

Maybe we will have 10 million people in 2050, mostly people themselves or with parents or grandparents born in Asia? And maybe those people will continue to provide the high-quality services to which our older people have become accustomed.

Or maybe not? Those young people from Asia, Africa and Latin America – too many of whom are dying these years as boat people or in Mexico, or stuck in immigration-visa-limbo – will be a precious international ‘commodity’ in 2050.

We can address these problems. But not with mainstream policies of dour fiscal probity.

One final matter to note. Thanks to New Zealand’s universal pension system (New Zealand Superannuation), an exceptionally large number of people of ‘retirement age’ are still in employment or running businesses. Universal benefits enable employment. The worst thing any government could do in the next decade would be to create disincentives for older people to work, by moving towards means-tested retirement-income options.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The covid-19 pandemic has already generated its own mythology. In Britain, they talk of the “myth of the blitz” – the idea of a society that pulled together in the Second World War to withstand the bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe with pluck, bravery and humour.

In Australia, our covid-19 myth is about a cohesive and caring society that patiently endured lockdowns, border closures and other ordeals. Like many myths, ours has some foundation in reality.

It might be a poor thing when considered alongside wartime Britain’s wartime sacrifices, and you have to ignore the empty toilet paper shelves in the local supermarket, but it still has its own force. It might be especially potent in Melbourne, where the restrictions were most severe and prolonged.

The covid-19 myth is now presenting its puzzles to true believers. If you imagined we all pulled together for the common good, and because we have the good sense to look after our own health, you are likely to find it strange that we are now apparently prepared to tolerate dozens of deaths in a day.

Australia’s total covid death toll is now above 11,000 – New Zealand’s has topped 2000.

More than tolerate: there has been a preparedness to pretend nothing out of the ordinary is happening.

All of this seems a far cry from those days when we hung on the daily premiers’ media conferences and experienced horror as the number of new infections rose above a few dozen a day, a few hundred, and then a thousand or so. Have our senses been blunted, our consciences tamed?

A product of power
Public discourse is never neutral. It is always a product of power. Some people are good at making their voices heard and ensuring their interests are looked after.

Others are in a weak position to frame the terms of debate or to have media or government take their concerns seriously.

The elderly — especially the elderly in aged-care facilities — have carried a much larger burden of sacrifice than most of us during 2020 and 2021. They often endured isolation, loneliness and anxiety.

They were the most vulnerable to losing their lives — because of the nature of the virus itself, but also due to regulatory failure and, in a few places, gross mismanagement.

Aged Care Minister Anika Wells has provided @abcnews with new details on COVID cases in residential aged care homes:

983 current outbreaks
6000+ residents infected
3250 staff are positive

ADF support for aged care homes will be continued until the end of September.

— Henry Belot (@Henry_Belot) July 24, 2022

Casual and gig economy workers, too, struggle to have their voices heard. On his short journey to an about-face over the question of paid pandemic leave, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at first said the payment was unnecessary because employers were allowing their staff to work from home.

Yet the conditions of those in poorly paid and insecure work have been repeatedly identified as a problem for them as well as for the wider community, because they are unable easily to isolate.

Up to his point, however, our democracy has spoken: we want our pizzas delivered and we want to be able to head for the pub and the restaurant. And we are prepared to accept a number of casualties along the way to have lives that bear some resemblance to those of the pre-covid era.

The “we” in this statement is doing a lot of heavy lifting. There is a fierce debate going on about whether governments — and by extension, the rest of us — are doing enough to counter the spread of the virus.

Political leadership matters
Political leadership matters enormously in these things.

In the years following the Second World War, Australia’s roads became places of carnage, as car ownership increased and provision for road safety was exposed as inadequate. It peaked around 1970, with almost 3800 deaths — more than 30 for every 100,000 people.

Road fatalities touched the lives of many Australians. If not for the death of my father’s first wife in a vehicle accident on New Year’s Day in 1954, I would not be around to write this article today.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the coming of mandatory seatbelt wearing and random breath-testing helped bring the numbers down. Manufacturers made their cars safer.

Public campaigns urged drivers to slow down and stay sober. These were decisions aimed at avoiding avoidable deaths, despite the curtailment of freedom involved.

A British seat belt advertisement from the 1970s.

These decisions were also in the Australian utilitarian tradition of government, “whose duty it is to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number” – as the historian W.K. Hancock famously explained in 1930.

The citizen claimed not “natural rights”, but rights received “from the State and through the State”. Governments made decisions about how their authority could be deployed to preserve the common good and protect individuals — from themselves as well as from others.

Pragmatic position
Governments have during the present surge so far been willing to take what they regard as a pragmatic position that the number of infections and fatalities is acceptable to “the greatest number”, so long as “the greatest number” can continue to go about something like their normal lives.

But this utilitarian political culture also has its dark side. It has been revealed persistently throughout the history of this country — and long before anyone had heard of covid-19 — as poorly equipped to look after the most vulnerable.

The casualties of the current policy are those who have consistently had their voices muted and their interests set aside during this pandemic — and often before it, as well.

These are difficult matters for governments that would much prefer to get on with something other than boring old pandemic management. The issue is entangled in electoral politics — we have just had a federal contest in which major party leaders studiously ignored the issue, and the nation’s two most populous states are to hold elections in the next few months.

Governments also realise that restrictions and mandates will meet civil disobedience.

But covid cannot be wished away. At a minimum, governments need to show they are serious about it to the extent of spending serious money on a campaign of public information and advice on issues like mask-wearing and staying home when ill.

They usually manage to find a sufficient stash of public money ahead of each election when they want to tell us what a beaut job they’ve been doing. They might now consider whether something similar might help to save lives.

Dr Frank Bongiorno is professor of history, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz