Birth Rate in Free Fall, Caused by… Can You Guess?

Last week, the Australia Bureau of Statistics released its latest Births, Australia report, and the results are not good. The total fertility rate was 1.50 births per woman. To put that in perspective, that’s the lowest fertility rate since European settlement. A rate of less than 2.1 will ultimately result in a population decline, without taking into consideration immigration of course. It’s not as bad as say countries like South Korea, which has the world’s lowest fertility rate of around 0.7, which their president has recently declared as a “demographic national emergency”.

Last month, the ABC were reporting that Australia’s population reached 27 million largely driven by overseas migration. Looking at their chart, it’s clear that so-called “natural increases” play only a small part in Australia’s population growth. The majority of growth is now attributed to “net overseas migration”. Australians aren’t having enough babies, so the government turn on the immigration tap.

They note that the dip in population growth in 2021 was largely driven by the pandemic. But interestingly, do you remember the reports from a few years ago? “Pandemic baby boom: Will global lockdown see massive jump in Australia’s birth rate?”. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, the baby boom never eventuated, quite the opposite. It’s clear that you can’t just lock everybody up in their homes and expect them to procreate like some kind of caged animal. Actually, animals born in captivity are only half as likely to reproduce compared to their wild counterparts. It turns out, we need our freedom.

So what do you think is causing Australia’s historically low birth rate? My first thought was to look to our ABC, as I know they would definitely have something interesting to say. “The story of us”, they titled it. What do you think they talk about? Go on, take a guess. What’s the first thing we often hear in Australia? Well, first they mentioned the numbers: “Altogether these numbers contributed to a record-breaking increase of 1 million people in under two years.” But then, unsurprisingly, they talk about First Nations Australians. “Terra nullius was a lie”. They always have to bring up our dark history. “Ancestors of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people used sophisticated and planned navigation systems to island hop to the Australian mega-continent more than 50,000 years ago.” At least they’re using the more conservative 50,000-years-ago figure.

“British colonisation after 1788 brought with it displacement, sexual violence, infectious diseases, and the massacre of First Nations people who had thrived here for tens of thousands of years.” Yes, get ready for the lecture. “Liberal Party leader Sir Joseph Cook argued that immigration was a tool for maintaining the highest white standards. To achieve it, First Nations Australians endured ongoing harms in the name of the colonial project, generating adverse impacts that continue to this day.” “Women and children suffered in the call for peopling and procreation.”

To attract immigrants, they used posters like this: “Australia: the land of tomorrow”. “For many women, the poor and First Nations Australians, this land of tomorrow rhetoric would have felt very remote from reality.” The government at the time tried to encourage women to have more children. “The call of the stars to British men and women. Men for the land. Women for the home.” But, “By 1976 the birth rate dropped again, to below the rate of replacement, where it has remained ever since.” Noting that four years earlier, according to the National Museum, “In 1972, in his first 10 days in office, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam abolished the luxury tax on all contraceptives, and placed the pill on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme list, reducing its cost to $1 per month.” I’m not saying that’s the cause, but it certainly wouldn’t have helped.

Finally in the ABC article, after the long-winded Australia-hating lecture, they mention the record low fertility rate of 1.5 babies per woman. “There has been no Gen-C pandemic baby boom.” Of course, they point out that “migrants aren’t to blame for Australia’s multiple crises”, and of course they state that, “gender inequality needs to be revisited”.

Gender, First Nation Australians, colonisation, it’s amazing they didn’t somehow squeeze the LGBT community in there somehow. It’s funny, the rhetoric in these articles is always, “First Nations people had their land stolen, but immigration is good!”, but don’t those two points run counter to one another? Do Aboriginal Australians agree with all this immigration? More people coming to their lands without their approval?

None of this comes as much of a surprise really, when you take a look into the author, Liz Allen. Dr Liz Allen, known by her handle “DrDemography”, is a demographer at the Australian National University. If you look at some of her tweets, things become a bit clearer.

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Allégro by Emmit Fenn