Welcome to play2upnow.com.au

Why 2-up?
We have named this site play 2-Up now because it encapsulates what we need to do to turn around the rate of birth per fertile female.

At present only 1.76 children are born to every fertile female in Australia. (see this link)

In order to redress this, we need to raise this to 2.1 children per female, just to maintain our current population. 2.1 is over 2, so we thought, in keeping with the ANZAC tradition of playing 2-Up on ANZAC day, we would use this as a Catch-phrase to link the idea to getting our birth-rate up!

So get out there & play 2-Up, legally every day of the year.

This website is dedicated to those of you who are interested in doing something about the very disturbing decline in Australia’s domestic population renewal activity.

Over the years, we have encountered fairly wide swings in the number of people born in Australia. Right now, though, it has never been so low. (For more information on this see “Doing the numbers – Australia’s birth-rate statistics”.)

Many people may not see a problem with a declining birth rate. After all, don’t too many people live on the planet? Isn’t the world overcrowded with insufficient resources to feed many people? Aren’t there huge problems with pollution resulting from too many people?

There is some truth in this, of course. There are too many people on this planet – but the distribution of these people is the problem. Yes, there are huge problems in some parts of the world.

The problem of overcrowding does not, in any serious sense, apply to Australia, however

Economic Reality: In any economy or society, there is a gradual transition from the people who carry the greatest share of productivity to the next generation. In other words as children grow up, they take on a greater and greater role as the breadwinner as their parents get older and head towards retirement. Sooner or later your memories of mum & dad completely taking care of every facet of your life fades to you leaving home and making a life for yourself. This changes to you having a family of your own, promotions in your career and, almost without realising it greater responsibilities in your life. Before you know it, you begin to see that mum & dad don’t seem to cope with life as well any more and you start to manage their affairs on their behalf.

This progression has been going on since we lived in caves. In those days your career advancement meant that you took charge of the hunting party. It remains the natural order of things.

The system breaks down, however, when there aren’t enough children coming through to replace mum & dad. That is what is happening in Australia right now. Governments know this: For years now workers & their employers in Australia have been required to have some form of compulsory superannuation. Before this, most Australians simply went on the pension when they retired. The Government realised long ago that they would not be able to afford to pay pensions – because there simply weren’t enough young people coming through to pay the taxes to cover the pensions.

Don’t get us wrong. We think that compulsory saving (i.e. Superannuation) is a good thing.

Just understand, however, that the decline in our birth rate is already affecting you personally, through compulsory superannuation.

Immigration: You might say, well, if we aren’t having enough kids, there are always plenty of people who would love to come to Australia and make their lives here. This is only partially true.

See “Immigration – can it fill the gap?”

So whilst immigration continues to contribute to the rich & diverse country that Australia is today it is simply not the whole story. Immigration should always be seen as a policy to augment the healthy diverse and expanding domestic population.

If immigration dominated over domestic population growth in 50 years – living memory – the national character of the country would change in ways we just cannot imagine