The impact on Australia of China's move last week to overturn its decades-long one-child policy has been vastly underestimated, according to two of Australia's leading business people. 
Billionaire developer Harry Triguboff believes the impact will be more rapid than expected, stimulating not only China's economy and property markets but those of its trading partners. Former senior Macquarie Group banker Bill Moss likened the flow-on effect to the post World War II baby boom.
Mr Moss, who spearheaded Macquarie's move into apartment development in China in the mid-1990s, said a number of Australian industries, including dairy, education and property, would experience a ripple effect.
"Throughout the world where there has been a boom in children, economic growth has followed, not just for six months, but for decades." Mr Moss predicted a boost - in nine months - for Australia's dairy and baby products industries.
It would flow on to children's clothes, agribusiness, education and real estate, Mr Moss said. "People will get pregnant and will buy another apartment," he said.
China's leadership last week announced it would overturn the 1979 one-child policy, allowing couples to have two children to stimulate long-term growth in the cooling economy.
Mr Triguboff, who has a development pipeline of 7500 apartments through his Meriton Group that targets mostly local and offshore Chinese buyers, said Chinese families focused on -securing investments for their children's futures.
"The Chinese government wants to get the economy moving, and it will spill over into Australia," Mr Triguboff said. "The impact will be more immediate than expected." Demographer and KPMG partner Bernard Salt said the one-child policy would weigh on China's growth for the next 30 years. By the 2020s the working-age population, 15-64 years, would go into decline, resulting in less taxes and more elderly people to support.
"It's like turning around a -supertanker. It has taken 35 years to get to this and it will take three decades to push in the other -direction," he said.Mr Salt said the overhang of the one-child policy and its reversal was most likely negative for Australia. Sectors such as education and possibly property would not benefit, he said. The cost of a second child would more likely inhibit sending children to Australian universities and would make offshore property investment less affordable, he said.