Download the full report: Raising the Next Generation
A practical plan to protect children, support parents, strengthen families, and restore genuine choice
Australia’s long term prosperity depends on whether families can form, raise children with stability, and build secure lives. Yet across housing, taxation, childcare, workforce settings, and population policy, Australia’s institutions have drifted out of alignment with family life. As a result, fewer Australians form families, young adults delay household formation, parental stress rises, and fiscal pressure across health, welfare, and education systems accelerates.
This paper sets out a comprehensive reform agenda to realign Australia’s economic and social settings with the realities of family life. It recognises that strong families drive productivity, fiscal sustainability, social cohesion, and national resilience.
Guiding Principles
This paper is grounded in six core principles:
1. Children are a public good
Our children are the next generation of citizens, workers, carers, innovators and parents. When families thrive, the whole nation benefits. But too often we ask parents (especially mothers) to carry most of the financial, physical and opportunity costs of raising our children alone. A pro-child society makes a different choice by honouring raising children as nation-building work, and shares the load so more Australians can form families with confidence.
2. Caregiving is productive work
The earliest years shape a child’s lifelong trajectory, including across health, learning, resilience, employability and earning potential outcomes. When policy treats caregiving as a “career break” rather than a foundational investment, it misprices what matters most, penalises families for doing essential work, and misallocates resources away from the place they deliver the highest long-run returns. A pro-family economy recognises care as value creation and structures tax, retirement and workplace settings accordingly.
3. Women deserve real choice
Real choice means the freedom to engage in care work without suffering significant financial penalty. It means policies that respect different seasons of life including study, work, parenting, and caring rather than steering women into a single “right” pathway. A society that values women builds settings that ensures they are economically secure through caregiving years, so decisions can be guided by what’s best for them and their children, not fear of future disadvantage.
4. Families are foundational infrastructure
Families form human capital, transmit values, stabilise communities, and underpin economic performance. When families weaken, costs are shifted onto the state at far greater expense.
5. Population renewal must be sustainable
Migration can complement national growth, but it cannot substitute for family formation. When mass migration is used as a demographic band-aid, it exacerbates housing, wage, and infrastructure pressures that further suppress fertility rates.
6. Local communities are the foundation of family life
The future of Australian families cannot be built solely in our capital cities. Regional and rural communities face unique economic and service challenges that require deliberate policy attention. Reform must strengthen country towns and regional centres as places where families can form, settle and thrive.
Key Policy Reforms at a Glance
The reforms proposed in this paper operate as a coherent system, aligned to the stages of family formation, caregiving, housing access, and national capacity.
Supporting Early Childhood
• Extend statutory Paid Parental Leave to 12–18 months, with eligibility and payment structures aligned to early childhood development and workforce retention objectives.
• Replace the current childcare-only subsidy with a Choice in Care Subsidy for children aged 0–3, payable for parental care, kinship care, home-based care, community care, or centre-based care.
• Introduce supplementary national accounting measures to explicitly value unpaid caregiving, including regular publication of caregiving satellite accounts alongside GDP and productivity metrics.
Reducing the Motherhood Penalty and Giving Women Real Choice
• Establish an ATO-administered caregiver superannuation credit, paid during parental leave and early caregiving periods, to prevent long-term retirement balance erosion.
• Implement a 25 per cent reduction in outstanding HECS-HELP debt per child, applied progressively on birth.
• Introduce a child-linked personal income tax reduction for mothers (25 per cent per dependent child, to age 16)
• Embed a care-centric workforce framework, including default flexible work arrangements, enforceable part-time rights, father-inclusive leave provisions, and structured re-entry and re-skilling pathways.
• Fund re-skilling/return-to-work pathways for parents.
Making Family Life Affordable and Logistically Feasible
• Shift elements of the personal income tax system toward family-based taxation, including optional income splitting during child-rearing years.
• Remove emissions-based penalties on larger family vehicles and provide targeted rebates or concessional finance for safe, high-occupancy vehicles.
• Offer family vehicle support (rebates/low-interest loans for larger safety-rated vehicles).
• Introduce an income protection subsidy for primary earners in families with three or more children.
Restoring a Pathway to Family Home Ownership
• Undertake a comprehensive review of tax settings and financial incentives that may be amplifying speculative demand in established housing stock. The aim should be to rebalance the system so it supports new supply and long-term stability rather than encouraging competition between families and investors for existing homes.
• Introduce targeted downsizing incentives for older Australians, including a temporary Age Pension assets test relief for genuine downsizers, and stamp duty credits on the purchase of a smaller principal residence.
• Establish a Building Australia Fund allowing downsizers to invest released housing equity into government backed infrastructure projects without capital gains penalties.
• Partner with states on a Regional Growth Strategy to direct infrastructure investment toward regional and rural growth centres, deliberately strengthening country communities and enabling large-scale, well-planned greenfield development outside the capital cities.
Migration Reform Aligned with National Capacity
• Significantly reduce the permanent migration program through staged reductions and formal review.
• Phase down international student enrolments and tighten enforcement of temporary visa work conditions.
• Rationalise skilled migration occupation lists to genuine, persistent shortages, particularly in health, trades, and critical engineering roles.
• Tighten temporary education pathways by reducing low-productivity, high-churn VET and coursework-based visa streams while protecting research-intensive and high-skill programs.
Taken together, these reforms reorient Australia’s economic and social settings toward long-term stability rather than short-term throughput. They recognise that family formation, caregiving, housing access, workforce participation, and population policy are interdependent.
By supporting families to form earlier, raise children with stability, and maintain long-term economic security, this agenda strengthens productivity, social cohesion, and national resilience. It positions family life as a shared national priority and a central pillar of economic strength.
