Babies, Ballots & A Birth Rate Blind Spot

Andrew Urquhart is joined by commentator Brendan Malone to dissect a leaders' debate moment where Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins fumbled a question on New Zealand's plummeting fertility rate, now at 1.51 births per woman. Malone argues both leaders treated a serious economic and social issue with trivial, awkward humour, with Luxon dodging entirely and Hipkins wrongly claiming financial incentives alone lift birth rates, despite global data showing otherwise.

Malone warns the fertility collapse is fundamentally an economic problem tied to the loss of New Zealand's Christian heritage, which once honoured motherhood and fruitfulness as gifts rather than burdens. He critiques mass immigration (citing Eric Crampton's call for 125,000 migrants a year) and raising the retirement age as inadequate band-aids, and points to P.D. James's novel "Children of Men" as a chilling, prophetic warning that ageing, infertile societies may ultimately turn to euthanasia as an economic "solution".

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