Hours after being elected, the new Nationals leader, Matt Canavan, declared he wanted to see a “hyper” Australia and “more Australian babies”. The father of five envisions an Australia where maternity wards are full, parents have ample time and incentive to rear their children at home, and Sunday afternoons are “carefree”.
Canavan’s strong views on the traditional family unit and abortion are well known – in his first speech to parliament he committed to working to ensure that Australians are able to “have their own family”. But his latest call comes amid a decline in Australia’s fertility rate to a record low of 1.48 per woman in 2024 and a growing push around the world to encourage more people to have bigger families. It is a trend particularly pronounced among populist conservative parties, including self-proclaimed “fertility president” Donald Trump, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK alongside influential billionaires, like father of 14 Elon Musk, who has warned “civilisation will disappear” unless the fertility rate recovers.
Politicians trying to get people to have more babies is not a new phenomenon. Two decades ago, the then Australian treasurer, Peter Costello, famously encouraged Australians to have “one for mum, one for dad, and one for the country”; waving a $3,000 cheque in front of families to convince them to have another baby. A decade before, John Howard, as opposition leader, proposed income splitting for families, which would incentivise women to stay home with their children – a policy he never introduced as PM.
So what’s behind this latest push in Australia?
The immigration factor
The underlying motivation for this renewed preoccupation with boosting our baby numbers among the political right, says ANU professor Robert Breunig, is both a return to the traditional family and a response to increasing immigration.
“In 2004 when Peter Costello introduced the baby bonus, it was really just about declining fertility in Australia and making sure that Australia continued to produce population,” Breunig said.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailOver the past two decades, as immigration has become an increasingly hot-button topic, Breunig says the intention has somewhat changed to “subsidising the ‘right people’ – in quotes – to have kids”, meaning Australian families giving birth to Australian children or British families giving birth to British children.
“It’s a phenomenon we’re seeing all over the world,he says. “We certainly see this in western Europe quite a bit.”
At a demography summit in 2020 attended by the former Australian conservative prime minister Tony Abbott, the Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán, whose government advocates a “procreation not immigration” platform, stoked fear over immigration levels across the continent, saying, “if Europe is not going to be populated by Europeans in the future and we take this as given, then we are speaking about an exchange of populations, to replace the population of Europeans with others”.
In the UK, Farage has proposed to abolish the two-child limit on social benefits, which he says will make “having children just a little bit easier” for lower-paid workers. But the limit would still apply to migrant families “who come into the country and suddenly decide to have a lot of children”.
In the US, Trump has vowed to increase support for IVF, while cracking down on immigration and abortion rights. His vice-president, JD Vance, has previously described women without children as less stable and more “sociopathic”.
Locally, the Nationals have already begun canvassing policies including income splitting, 18-month paid parental leave and cheaper family car loans to encourage couples to have multiple children. A paper the party commissioned by a Nationals-aligned thinktank made recommendations to ease the tax load for families, while simultaneously tapering off Australia’s immigration intake.
The report uses the contentious term “mass migration” and states that when immigration is used as a “demographic Band-Aid, it exacerbates housing, wage, and infrastructure pressures that further suppress fertility rates”.
While the abortion debate has largely been avoided in Australia, Canavan and a handful of other conservative MPs have tried to bring it into the spotlight. The Queensland senator, a staunch Catholic, clashed with former Liberal leader Peter Dutton after refusing to withdraw a “children born alive” bill that would make it an offence for a medical practitioner to withhold healthcare to a foetus described as “born alive” after a late-term abortion.
The small group of conservatives also tried to change a law introduced by the government in late 2025 to give paid parental leave to parents of a child who is stillborn or dies, arguing it should not be available to anyone needing a late-term abortion.
‘Do I go and have more kids and struggle?’
There is growing alarm over falling fertility rates across the world. Europe, the Americas, South Korea, China and Japan all face a population cliff, which means without birthrates reaching a replacement rate (2.1 per female) there won’t be enough young people to provide the services and pay the taxes to keep society going forward, with too many old people for them to support.
It’s not that families don’t want to have more children, says Chantelle Cox, a single mother to nine-year-old Lainey, it’s that many can’t.
Cox, who works full-time and lives in suburban Sydney, tells Guardian Australia that as one of three, she always dreamed of having two or three children, but as a single mother almost from the outset, opportunities were shut off and she has faced a series of difficult choices.
“Every decision that I make is about providing stability and a secure home for myself [and] for Lainey, which means I’ve had to make the decision to abandon my wants … what I’d imagined my future would look like in terms of having more children.”
“It’s come down to ‘Do I provide my child a more secure future and safer house and things like that, or do I go and have more kids and struggle?”
Cox says the main issues for her have been access to long-term housing and affordable childcare. She says Lainey has also always wanted siblings, and has seen her other mum friends facing similar difficult choices between housing, bills and more children.
Temporary one-off policies such as baby bonuses don’t address the “real barriers”, she says, and she points to better housing, accessible childcare and regular tax breaks – which have been introduced overseas.
Do pronatalist policies work?
Despite offering free IVF and generous tax concessions for women who have multiple children, Hungary’s fertility rate was 1.39 babies per female in 2024. World Bank data shows Italy, whose conservative government has also pushed the “the great replacement” conspiracy theory, recorded a fertility rate of 1.2 in 2023,, while the rate in the United States and United Kingdom in 2023 was 1.6, all well below the replacement rate.
Even Nordic countries, which have gold-standard affordable and high-quality childcare, as well as generous parental leave programs with a focus on gender equity, have not been able to turn the tide. In 2023, World Bank data showed Norway and Sweden’s fertility rates were 1.4, while Denmark was 1.5.
Prof Nicholas Biddle, at the Australian National University, says there are some patterns emerging on how different governments offer support, but they’re not definitive.
“Internationally, a lot of the support for increased fertility through childcare and paid parental leave has either been introduced or extended by parties which tend to be on the left. If you look at kind of cash transfers, so a more direct payment focus, they tend to be by parties on the right,” he says.
“The populist right, or a further right [looks at] policies which aim to increase fertility based on an ethnic cultural ground.”
Research by the e61 institute found that, after Peter Costello introduced his baby bonus, births increased by 6.5%, with births increasing by 10% among mothers with no taxable income, by 8% among below-median income mothers, while high-income mothers showed no response.
It also found that births of a third child increased by 9%, and that mothers who received the baby bonus, as a group, had 6.8% more children in total by 2022.
Biddle says policy bundling can have an impact, as “having an extra six weeks of paid parental leave or a baby bonus isn’t going to matter if you don’t have childcare for the next five years”.
Luara Ferracioli, associate professor of political philosophy at the University of Sydney, says it is too early to tell whether modern tax incentives, more affordable childcare or free IVF will have an impact.
“Some of those policies haven’t been in place for that long, and we also don’t know what would have happened if those policies hadn’t been adopted,” Ferracioli says.
“Maybe they would have dropped even further without most egalitarian pro-children policies.”
The base problem of turning around a declining population is not a partisan issue, she says. Economists, demographers and social scientists are all sounding the alarm.
But population decline and migration are inextricably linked, Ferracioli says, which leads to partisan debate. She worries that it takes away from finding solutions to the real issue.
“Sometimes it looks like when the right side of politics says that people should have more children … they’re really saying that we should have more white babies.”
On the whole, she says, the politics of arresting population decline is a distraction from the real issue. “I just don’t see how that moves the conversation forward.”
