A One Nation candidate recently argued that high levels of migration cannot substitute for the millions of potential Australians lost to abortion and chronically low birth rates, and that Australia should support its own mothers having children rather than relying on importing other people's. The claim drew immediate accusations of "great replacement" conspiracy-mongering. The conspiratorial framing can be set aside. The underlying demographic arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable.

Australia's total fertility rate sits at 1.497 births per woman (ABS, 2025 data). That is the third consecutive year below 1.5 and far below the 2.1 replacement level. It has been sub-replacement since 1976. Registered births were just under 300,000 in 2025. Natural increase (births minus deaths) is running around 100,000–110,000 a year. Net overseas migration, even after falling from post-COVID peaks above 500,000, remains in the vicinity of 290,000–300,000 and accounts for roughly three-quarters of total population growth. Without migration, the population would still grow, but slowly; with sustained sub-replacement fertility, the native-born share contracts over successive generations.

Abortion numbers are not perfectly captured (states report differently and medical abortion has expanded), but the best available estimates put annual induced abortions in the range of roughly 70,000–90,000 in recent years (Medical Journal of Australia methodology and subsequent updates). That is a substantial fraction of the gap between actual births and replacement. Every abortion is a birth that does not occur from the existing population stock. Reducing the rate of unintended pregnancy and abortion, through better contraception access, cultural shifts, or family-support policies, would raise natural increase without adding a single migrant. Migration, by contrast, adds people who arrive already formed by other societies.

The two are not interchangeable. A child born to Australian parents grows up inside the language, institutions, norms, and historical memory of the country. A migrant, however high-skilled or well-intentioned, arrives with a different formation; their children may integrate, but the process is slower, uneven, and not guaranteed. High and continuous migration therefore changes the composition of the population even while it stabilises total numbers. That is measurable demography, not conspiracy. Countries across the developed world with fertility below 1.5–1.8 and net migration in the hundreds of thousands per year are experiencing precisely this shift. Pretending the numbers do not produce a changing cultural balance is ideology, not statistics.

There are practical costs to treating migration as the permanent solution. Rapid population growth driven by migration has coincided with acute housing shortages, infrastructure strain, and pressure on wages in lower-skilled sectors. Selection matters: temporary students, family reunion, and humanitarian streams do not deliver the same fiscal or productivity contribution as carefully chosen skilled workers. Using migration to paper over low fertility also creates a dependency. Once fertility is entrenched at 1.5, the only way to avoid eventual population decline (absent migration) is perpetual high inflows. That is a policy choice with long-term consequences for social cohesion, political stability, and the continuity of the institutions built by the founding population.

The alternative is unfashionable but not mysterious. Fertility responds to the costs and rewards of having children. Housing affordability, the time and money costs of raising kids, parental leave, childcare, and the cultural status of family formation all matter. Countries and regions that have raised fertility (or at least slowed the decline) have typically combined family-friendly economics with norms that treat having children as a normal, supported life path rather than an expensive lifestyle choice. Australia's regional areas already show higher fertility than the capitals; the pattern is not mysterious. Supporting Australian mothers to have Australian children is not "racist"; it is the default policy of every society that intends to persist.

Critics will call any discussion of differential fertility and migration "replacement theory." The term has been used for both deliberate-plot claims and for straightforward demographic observation. The latter is what the ABS numbers describe. A society can decide that rapid demographic transformation is desirable or inevitable. It cannot pretend that high migration is a neutral, costless substitute for its own missing births, or that abortion rates in the tens of thousands per year are irrelevant to the size and composition of the next generation.

The One Nation candidate's core point survives the political noise: if Australia wants a population that is recognisably continuous with its past, it cannot indefinitely outsource reproduction to other countries. Raising the birth rate among people already here, by reducing the barriers to family formation and the number of abortions, is not a substitute for all migration. It is the only durable alternative to using migration as a permanent demographic crutch.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/one-nation-candidate-says-mass-migration-cannot-replace-millions-lost-to-abortion-6122223