NZ : Marriage: an enduring institution
From http://www.maxim.org.nz/discuss/thread.php?topic=111.1
Subject: Marriage: an enduring institution
There's some good news on the marriage front. Statistics NZ says last year saw the greatest number of marriages since 1991 -- 21,420. That was 3.5 percent more than the previous year. The marriage rate has stayed stable for several years now, at 14 out of every 1,000 eligible not-marrieds. The figure is inflated somewhat, though, because more than one in three marriages are between people who have been married before.
While it's a positive indicator of the enduring preference for marriage (according to the 2001 Census, for every 100 people in a relationship, 80 were married), we have still fallen a long way since the peak in 1971, when 45 out of every 1,000 married.
Balanced against this are some sobering figures which show that between June 2001 and June 2003, sole-parent families with dependent children outgrew two-parent families, not only in percentage terms but in absolute numbers.
Lindsay Mitchell, a petitioner for a review of the DPB, says that according to the New Zealand Income Survey, produced by Statistics NZ, single-parent families grew by 12,600 or nine percent. Two-parent families grew by only 11,000 or three percent. "This trend is very bad news," says Mitchell. "When marriages fail or parents reject each other it is a cost to all of society. Children from one-parent families are more likely to live in poverty or be on welfare. They are more likely to exhibit negative outcomes."
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