there's our catastrophe

yuriandrogynopov:

monetizeyourcat:

yuriandrogynopov:

basednkrumah:

bihlcosbitherapperslashactor:

pizzavanguard:

holy fucking shit

we’re breeding humans now

“marginal cost per additional child figure”

Why do you think lawmakers want abortion to be illegal

The countries always been obsessed with new workers this isnt really new for us, most of our history is defined by collosal population booms encouraged by the government.

isn’t a lot of that to do with preferring - for obvious and gross reasons - native-born babies to the many people who want to immigrate to australia

Sort of, but most of our immigration is western, the UK was, is and will continue to be the largest source of new australian immigrations ever since its founding the only time other countires came close was after WW2 when huge amounts of people from eastern and southern europe moved here (which also is why catholicism has a higher presence than anglicanism now).

For the most part the baby bonus is a way for the government to get into the good books of the middle and lower classes but its also pretty handy for new families because it means a simple lump sum to go towards your new baby’s care.

I’m gonna dispute this

firstly, white australian anxiety about immigration has very little connection to the actual numbers of people migrating and where they’re coming from

the majority of immigrants to Australia are from the uk but mostly because our immigration system is structurally racist

even putting asylum seekers aside, it’s pretty easy to immigrate from the UK or NZ, not too bad from western europe, and fucked up, horrible, nightmare bureaucracy from most other places

this is very very explicitly laid out in the law, like my friends who immigrated from Colombia had a longer waiting period for their residency, more disease testing (!), more stringent employment requirements, etc than my friends who immigrated from Germany

there is a really long history in Australia of explicitly pro-natalist policies targeting Anglo-Australians with warnings that we must “populate or perish”

the baby bonus was promoted by the same government that promoted scare rhetoric about “boat people” sucking away our resources and destroying our natural environment through overpopulation

it’s hard to see much of a difference between that kind of stance and post-WWII minister for immigration arthur calwell’s “we have 25 years at most to populate this country before the yellow races are down on us”.  like the increase you mention in post-WWII migration from southern and eastern europe was a relaxation in the White Australia policy due to anxiety about possible Asian immigration, non-Western Europeans suddenly seemed like they could pass muster, this is a matter of historical record, this is widely known

mainstream political discourse around immigration and population in australia is hugely, I would say almost entirely, shaped by anxiety around the large population and economic importance of the Asian nations to the north

check out the list of people talking about “the yellow peril” in this incredibly racist and contemporary Australian website

I’m not even going to go into “the good books of the middle and lower classes” because there is a lot to unpack there but I invite you to consider that the means-test for the baby bonus is quite recent, i.e. was introduced by Labor.  during the Howard era the baby bonus was received by a lot of very wealthy parents.  its intent was explicitly to promote the birth of babies to parents with citizenship or permanent residency in Australia (so, mostly white people), not to support new parents who were struggling economically.   

also I think it’s important to remember that “lawmakers” in Australia and a lot of other places don’t want abortion to be illegal for everyone, they have actually encouraged abortion and sterilisation and lowered birth rates for a number of different groups, primarily people of colour, Indigenous people, poor and working-class people, women with disabilities, and trans people. 

anyway I’m gonna continue to believe that “the nuclear family is a function of capitalism” is a massively oversimplified representation of the situation and straight-up wrong in a number of important ways

ardhra:

And of course, Australia makes it into the top 5! Well done.