Watching the mice multiply in regional New South Wales makes you think they are not the brightest creatures. They are expanding at such a rate that, at times, they turn on each other.

Discovering that I had been carrying a live one around in the toe of my boot for more than an hour also made me wonder about my own intelligence.

It wasn’t until it wriggled that I realised it was there and, with more than one shriek, I despatched it from my boot into the middle of the office.

We regarded each other with frozen horror until a passing colleague helped the mouse see the light. Ironically, I had just done an office walk to check everyone’s mouse traps, taking my own special someone with me every step of the way.

Down in our shed, you can sometimes see them climbing over each other – a grey furry, writhing bundle.

And that is exactly what popped into my mind when I read about the urgent need to release new housing developments in Sydney, about how terrible it was that there was less land being released than in previous years. Like it’s a limitless commodity.

Just like the mice, we encourage our society to go forth and multiply. Heard of the baby bonus? Remember back in 2007 when we were urged to have “one child for mum, one for dad, and one for the country”?

I know we have an ageing population. But exactly how will creating more of us fix that? Aren’t a fair few of us going to age? I’m planning to. Do we keep having more and more children to subsidise the need to look after the seniors who had to subsidise the seniors before them?

I’m not putting my hand up to fix it, but there are already just too many of us. Currently, I believe the world population stands at about 7.9 billion people.

In Australia, we have more and more people looking about themselves – thanks to incredibly low interest rates – to buy a new home. We can’t keep providing new homes. End of story. Where are they going to go?

Already, we have taken over endless tracts of trees that provide us with the air we require and who house native animals, masses of which have either died or are living bewildered in suburbia or bush remnants.

I don’t have the answers. Just about everyone has the right to have children. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But it’s probably about time we started to look at where we are going and whether we are going to have to turn on each other when we get there.

Marie Low is a freelance journalist based in Gunnedah, New South Wales.