Australian Births Plummet (December 2021) – Why?

Somebody sent me an email recently asking me to investigate the latest birth figures coming out of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, especially regarding November and December. Out of curiosity, I decided to go take a look. In this video, I’ll replicate everything so that you can check these details for yourself if you want to.

First, I went to the ABS’s homepage, clicked on the search button at the top, and just typed in “births”. The first result dated 25 October 2022 is the one that I clicked on. That takes you to this page, which is the latest release, noting that the reference period is 2021. That is, they only have data from last year. The first thing that caught my eye was that “There were 309,996 registered births in 2021, an increase of 15,627 (5.3%) from 2020”. Okay, so nothing out of the ordinary there. But the email did mention November and December. So back at the ABS page I scrolled down looking for monthly data. It’s a bit tucked away. You have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to a section titled “Data Explorer datasets”, and in there you can see a link for “Births, by year and month of occurrence, by state of usual residence”. Click on that and you’re met with a pretty cool looking data explorer.

The table contains the number of births in Australia for every month since 1975 all the way up to 2021. If you look at 2021 between January and October, you can see that the numbers are fairly consistent: 24,000, 27,000, 25,000, 23,000. But then in November, there seems to be a fairly big decline. It goes down to around 18,000. In the last decade over Novembers, there hasn’t been anything close to that. It’s always been well above 20,000. Actually, you’d have to go back to around 1981 to see a figure that low, remember though, that the population of Australia in 1981 was only about 14.9 million. For comparison, the population in 2021 was 25.7 million. So in November last year, we had the same number of births as 40 years ago.

But that’s just November. If you look at December, it drops again to 6,659. Of course, if you compare that to the last decade of Decembers, that’s ridiculously small. No other December was less that 22,000. If you go all the way back to 1975 when record keeping began, it’s never been that low in any month, ever. Something is indeed strange about this data.

But I’m not going to stop there. I don’t give up easily. I want to know which states have had the worst declines in December. In this table, you can apply filters. First, you need to click on Month of Occurrence, then type in December and select that. To get a breakdown of state data, you need to click on Used Filters, then delete Australia by clicking the little cross. Yeah I know, this is a lot of mucking about, but this is what we have to do to find the data.

The table now shows December data broken down by each state. Scrolling to 2021, we can see that NSW has declined by more than half from around 7,500 to 3,000. Similarly in Queensland from around 4,500 to 1,700. Same thing in South Australia. Western Australia’s declined by like 80% from 2,500 to 500. The island state of Tasmania has done really well considering and kept their birth numbers relatively the same. Northern Territory declined by about two-thirds, with the ACT having similar declines.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that I skipped Daniel Andrews’ Victoria because I think that’s the most interesting. In all of Victoria, they only had 21 births in all of December, which is only a 99.6% reduction based on historical averages. I feel like these numbers must be wrong, but what can I say? These are the numbers on the Government servers which have been published worldwide. There’s absolutely no explanation for these figures. They haven’t really mentioned them at all. The only thing they state on the main page of the report is that the number of births went up in 2021 compared to 2020, but they certainly do not mention November or December unless you go looking for it.

Do any of you know why there were such few births in December last year? I mean, an entire state of 6.5 million people only had 21 births in a single month, less than one a day?! It sounds ridiculous, don’t you think? And the worse thing, the Government aren’t even talking about it as far as I can tell. I’m happy to be corrected.

If we look at the news nine months prior, that is, in February and March 2021 (when people would be conceiving babies for November and December), then we can see news about a Victoria lockdown: “Yes, another lockdown in Victoria hurts. But it might be our only way to avert a third wave”. “Crime statistics highlight impact of coronavirus lockdowns. Breaches of public health orders and a spike in family violence have laid bare the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Victorian crime”. Yeah, that’s certainly possible that those things affected the birth rate.

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