Of the many failings of the current left-liberal order, perhaps its greatest is its inability to perpetuate itself.
This was recently seen in Australia with the release of the country’s latest Intergenerational Report, and the news that the country is headed towards a much older and smaller population than expected, driven largely by a continued collapse in the fertility rate.
As such, the left-wing Labor government predictably emphasised the need to maintain Australia’s unprecedented immigration intake to offset its rapidly ageing population.
Although falling fertility is an issue across the developed world, the main problem in Australia is that the country’s progressive elites have done everything they can to exacerbate it. To adopt a quote from the classics, Australia’s liberal-cosmopolitan ruling class have created a barren wasteland and called it progress.
One of the main ways this is happening is via the ongoing promotion of LGBT ideology and lifestyle patterns – i.e. a way of life that by its nature is inimical to producing children. As will surprise nobody, the more a society encourages non-heterosexual partnerships the fewer children it has. This was confirmed last year in an academic study that unearthed the obvious by finding that “gay men and lesbians have fewer offspring than their straight counterparts”.
As a further indication, since Australia’s pro-LGBT Labor government came to power in 2022, the country’s birth rate has fallen from 1.63 to a current record low of 1.48, and is forecast to fall further still, with deaths set to outnumber births by the 2060s as the fertility rate heads toward 1.3.
The recent fall in fertility has, of course, coincided with a barrage of elite-led and government-funded LGBT programs, appearances by a number of ALP politicians at Pride events, and almost coast-to-coast state Labor governments.
It has also occurred alongside LGBT programs directed at children, like “drag queen story hour” and Wear it Purple Day, and via institutional fiat: with the recent Giggle vs Tickle case and the firing of a school principal for objecting to an LGBT event proving that opposing gender ideology and observing biological reality is both illegal and likely to lead to unemployment.
That this pro-LGBT push has led to an increase in LGBT populations and encouraged fewer childbirths is easily proven. In the United States, for instance, 2024 data showed that almost a third of Gen Z Americans “identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer”, a number that “dwarfs the percentages of LGBTQ Americans in older age groups” and that is both globally and historically extreme. US Census data from 2025 also reveals that the number of babies born in America is in drastic decline.
Similar trends are seen in Australia, with the rate of LGBT identification among Aussies aged 16 to 24 now up to around 10%, and LGBT identification among Australians of all ages doubling between 2012 and 2020. Indeed, this anti-natal trend is further seen in the growing number of Aussie men and women who say they don’t want to have children, and via a stream of pieces in the corporate press claiming that “there has never been a better time to not have a baby”.
Another part of our problem is female careerism. Aside from their LGBT campaigns, Australia’s leftist elites have long pushed an utterly toxic notion of “girlboss” idolatry on the country’s women. Instead of the historically normal encouragement of young women to become wives and mothers, generations of women have been propagandised into being workers first and women second. This is seen in federal Labor’s demand for half its caucus to be women, and in state Labor governments mandating female job quotas in industries like construction.
The message being pushed is that women must enter the workforce, and if they do have a child then they should send it off to childcare as soon as possible. That this influx of infants into childcare centres has proven catastrophic tends not to matter. Facts like the mass sexual assault of children at Australian childcare centres are ignored. As are the inherent physiological and social problems related to separating infants (i.e. mammals) from their parents. As are broader trends like the fact that Australia hasn’t had a replacement-level fertility rate since the 1970s.
Related to this is the issue of gender equality itself. Not only does the culture encourage women to work, it treats men and women as interchangeable entities in any and all domains. Women are not only pushed into naturally male industries like construction, but leftist cultural dominance means women are expected to be soldiers, UFC fighters, and footballers as well. This is also not to mention such occurrences as the rise of “gender-neutral” toilets, and the placing of “trans women” (men) in women’s sports leagues and prisons.
One problem is that this insistence on gender equality pays no regard to the inherent differences between the sexes. As researcher Steve Stewart Williams has shown, there are innate dissimilarities between the genders that naturally propel us into different fields. As Williams notes, more men than women exhibit a “math tilt” and a preference for STEM work, while more women than men exhibit a “verbal tilt” and favour areas like healthcare and education.
This leftist myopia toward nature has plainly led to a number of undesired effects. One of them concerns hypergamy or the tendency for women to “marry up”. As it turns out, and not unreasonably, women tend not to favour men who are of a lower socio-economic status than they are, with most women preferring to marry men who make the same or more than they do.
This is understandable from an individual woman’s perspective, but at a broader level it is social suicide. If, as now, we have increasing numbers of women entering universities and the upper strata of society, that means there are fewer men who meet their criteria for marriage. Cue then fewer marriages, fewer babies born, and an increasing number of unfulfilled men and women – a fact we can easily attest with the rise of “incels” on the one hand and “dog mothers” on the other.
What we have done, as American commentator Auron MacIntrye has noted, is “socially engineered” procreation out of existence. Progressive institutional capture has meant that all of the structures that once led people toward family formation have been eroded. As MacIntyre writes of America, marriage rates are now “dismal”, with “the percentage of married couples, average age at which couples are marrying, and number of children…all in catastrophic decline”.
These trends are seen in Australia too, and are further confirmed in the explosion in IVF use. This once-rare method of conception has now become completely commonplace. As a rough gauge of the industry’s growth, 1 in 16 babies in Australia are now born via “assisted reproductive technology”, with over 100,000 IVF cycles completed in Australia in 2024, of which 20% came from “single women and female same-sex couples”.
This has plainly benefited certain economic interests. In fact, the leftist ideological neutering of Australians and our march into the highly-expensive IVF sector has been a boon for business. As one economics outlet remarked of Australia, our “in vitro fertilization market has been experiencing strong expansion as Australians increasingly seek assisted reproductive solutions”.
Indeed, Australia’s IVF market is forecast to grow 8% per annum until 2033, rising in value from $733M USD in 2024 to $1.65B USD by 2033. A growth, incidentally, that is attributed to “rising infertility rates” and “evolving social norms” – in other words: via our insane insistence on LGBT ideology, female careerism, and other left-liberal ideals.
In essence, what has happened is that generations of Westerners have been indoctrinated into a cult of hyper liberalism and are only now realising its faults. This is seen in the upswing in IVF use, as large numbers of liberals try to start families in middle age. It is also seen in certain honest commentators, with the likes of former British Conservative MP Miriam Cates now warning that our left-dominated culture has “lied to women” about the reality of fertility.
It is not only the focus by our leftist establishment on gender issues that has hurt fertility and hampered family formation. Labor and Australia’s liberal elites have further damaged the ability of Australians to form families with many of their other ideological projects and policies.
One of the most consequential in their attitude toward housing. As is well known, Labor and its allies are planning to destroy much of what remains of middle-class urban Australia as they plan to pave over the suburban backyard and replace it with high-density housing blocks – see the plans for Sydney’s Woollahra as a case in point.
One of the issues with this is that greater urbanisation leads to lower fertility. As America’s Institute for Family Studies has found: “higher urban density and population concentration are strongly linked to lower fertility rates due to economic pressures, housing constraints, and biological stress responses.” Another American study found that the fertility rate was “inversely related” to the proportion of people living in apartments: i.e. the more people in apartments, the fewer babies that are born.
This is seen here as well. In Sydney and Perth, for instance, the study found that the total fertility rate in the two cities was a “healthy 2.0 in the expensive but family-friendly suburbs” but an “ultra-low 1.0 in the apartment-centric core”. This is further proven when we compare urban vs rural fertility rates, with ABS data showing that Australia has higher fertility in rural and regional areas than it does in the city.
Our falling fertility is also connected to what was – until recently – a bipartisan consensus: namely, ever-increasing house prices. This is beneficial if you’re an asset-rich Australian or a Boomer landlord. Yet the more money younger Australians need to spend on shelter, the less they have for starting a family and raising children. As one indication of this, a 2016 British study found that a 10% rise in home prices correlated with a 1.3% decrease in birthrates.
Australia’s left-leaning elite have thus created an anti-natal environment in which Australians are subjected to “anti-family” ideology as they are crammed into apartment blocks, thus eliminating the chance of the country ever achieving replacement-level fertility.
What, therefore, is to be done?
Well, the current government is doing what every other Australian government has done for decades: kick the reform can down the road and import the people we’ve been unable to produce ourselves via mass migration.
Yet this too produces problems for fertility. Despite the happy cosmopolitan vision promoted by our elites, a 2021 paper by America’s Centre for Immigration Studies found that diversity has a negative effect on natality. The study suggests that “there is some evidence that immigration reduces native fertility”, with data from large urban areas in America showing that “the higher the immigrant share of the population, the fewer children native-born women have”, a trend that holds “even after controlling for age, education, income, race, marital status, and other factors”.
There are other elite-led initiatives that have stymied family formation in Australia. Chief among them are developments like the casualisation and feminisation of the economy. As is now obvious, the old full-time male factory jobs of yore are long gone, and have largely been replaced by part-time positions in the services sector. This has naturally led to a wave of under- and un-employed men, and an equally unhappy cohort of unmarried and unfulfilled women.
What Australia needs is to reverse this path we have been on. We need to esteem the natural family again and stop soaking the populace in LGBT ideology. We need to cease forcing women into the labour market and their children into childcare centres. We need to give people affordable housing to raise families in, and not overpriced apartments. We need to give men the possibility of stable employment again, from which they can provide for their families. We need to stop mass immigration.
In essence, what we need to do is to give people hope. We need to give people a reason to want to bring children into the world – and a safe and functioning society in which this is possible. Maybe, just maybe, there is a new party out there that can make this happen.
Header image credit: Pexels.
