Australia’s record low birth rates are not cause for economic concern, and fearmongering about fertility is being used to convince people to accept higher immigration, a population sustainability lobby group says.
Data released this week by the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that Australia’s total fertility rate (TFR) fell to 1.5 in 2023, prompting warnings of severe economic consequences, with Elon Musk responding to the news by saying: “Birth rates continue to plummet. Population collapse is coming.”
Australian National University demographer Liz Allen told ABC News “we are basically staring down the barrel of no return”, saying economic growth was at risk and that as a result the government needed to focus on “housing affordability, economic security, gender equality and climate change”.
But Sustainable Population Australia on Friday described Ms Allen’s reaction as “unwarranted catastrophism”, and national president Peter Strachan said high immigration was a much more serious problem.
“The real threat to our economy is our very rapid population growth rate, over 80% from immigration. The infrastructure bills are crippling. More and more people fall through the cracks due to unaffordable housing and overstretched services,” he said.
“While it can be a bonanza for property speculators, no country has improved living standards for the poor while the population growth exceeds 2%.
“In contrast, no country has yet seen any reduction in its proportion of workers as a result of ageing or population decline. The ‘crisis’ is a myth devised to scare ordinary people into accepting higher immigration to pump corporate profits, while squeezing their living standards and trashing our natural environment.”
Mr Strachan said that while low birth rates were being used to justify higher levels of immigration, the negative effects of accepting so many foreigners was negatively affecting fertility.
“What is sad is that people are choosing not to have children because they can’t afford decent housing,” he said.
“Ultimately, if Australia stabilises its population, then housing will become more affordable and the fertility level may well go up. But that would require much lower immigration levels than we now have.”
Mr Strachan also pointed out that European birth rates have hovered around 1.5 for decades, but most EU nations have outperformed Australia economically on a per capita basis due to much lower net migration rates.
There were 286,998 births registered in Australia in 2023, resulting in a TFR of 1.50 babies per woman, down from 1.63 in 2022 and far below the replacement level of 2.1.
More than one-third (100,011 or 34.8%) were born to foreign mothers, including 16,593 to those from India, 8,650 from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, 7,420 from New Zealand, 6,986 from the United Kingdom, and 5,158 from the Philippines. 7,153 were born to sub-Saharan African mothers.
Lebanese mothers had the highest TFR with 3.21, followed by sub-Saharan African countries other than Kenya, Mauritius, South African and Zimbabwe on 2.51, Pakistan on 2.5, Bosnia and Herzegovina on 2.41, and Samoa on 2.39.
Indigenous women had a much higher TFR of 2.17, and babies with at least one aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander parents made up 8.6% of births.
Official data from last month showed that Australia’s population grew by 2.3% to 27,122,411 in the year to March 31, 2024, an increase of 615,300 people.
Net overseas migration was responsible for 83% of the growth, while births made up the other 17%.
