Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?

Yes, people who don't have kids are ending their genetic line when they die. But that doesn't mean that people who have kids are necessarily increasing the pool of people who want kids, percentage-wise.

Put another way, someone choosing to have kids isn't necessarily changing the balance between the child-bearing and child-free population in the world. If we could freeze the conditions that cause people to not want kids and keep them constant, we won't see the child-free "die out" and be replaced by people who only or predominantly want to have children. We'll just continue to see roughly the same proportion of people wanting and not wanting to have kids.

The Goldfields Water Supply Scheme pumps water over 560 km from Perth to Kalgoorlie; Dubbo is only 380 km from Newcastle. If you were serious about turning Dubbo into the state capital, you would have to give serious thought to building a pipeline to pump water from the Hunter, and then Dubbo would only run out of water if Newcastle was running out of water. (You could also build a pipeline from Sydney to Dubbo, which is only about 20km further, but much more mountainous terrain in the way.)

> I do think we should decentralise, but it will likely look more like Newcastle and Wollongong growing

Newcastle and Wollongong aren't really that much cheaper than Sydney. They are coastal, and everyone wants to live on the coast; also, Wollongong has physical growth limitations due to the Illawarra Escarpment. There's a lot more land on the other side of the Great Dividing Range, and water supply issues could be addressed with sufficient investment in water supply infrastructure.

> Also note, Canberra kind of fits your description - a regional "town", servicing the government. And it's also very expensive. As in, recently reported to be the second most expensive place in the country to buy a house, after Sydney.

Canberra is in some ways Australia's version of Washington DC. Although, DC has a very different social history – e.g. DC has historically (but as of last census no longer) had an African-American majority; and, DC is physically a lot smaller than the ACT is. But, what I am really talking about is an Australian analogue of Sacramento, Albany, Springfield (Illinois), Salem (Oregon), Carson City (Nevada), etc – which is something Australia doesn't have.

All that said, Queanbeyan's median house price is >$50K cheaper than Canberra's, by some measures beneath the average of Australian capital cities. And it is only 20 minutes drive from Canberra. In Sydney or Melbourne, that's what many would call an inner/middle suburb.

Is a childless teacher refusing to do their part to create the next generation? Arguably a good teacher can have more impact on society than any parent will. How about someone who invents a technology that has decades long repercussions.

George Washington didn't have children. Was he a parasite taking just the benefits from society?

I've got kids, but I'm not naive enough to think that people without kids are all parasites. I think a healthy society has a balance of people doing different things - raising children needs a huge amount of attention and emotional labour, and it's definitely not for everyone. But you can contribute to society in other ways.

The thing about having kids is that once you make the leap, you don't get to step back. A single decision to drop the birth control for a bit, and bam -- you're a parent with daily responsibilities for at least 18 years. That'll certainly get you out of your comfort zone, permanently.

But other things you can do are more or less entirely voluntary, and you can stop doing them at any time. So it takes more willpower to maintain, even if doing those things is strictly less work than raising a child.