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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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The Aboriginal population is growing on paper, but I'm not sure about overall birthrate figures - the increase in people identifying as Aboriginal is partly driven by changing patterns of identification (and the increasing number of mostly-white people claiming indigenous identity) as well as increasing life expectancies. So even if the birthrate stayed completely flat I would expect the number of Aboriginal people on the census to increase.

As far as I can tell the Aboriginal birth rate is pretty flat overall, though higher than that of non-indigenous people. It is not so high that I expect an exploding Aboriginal population in the short to medium term, especiall since, though their birth rate is higher than non-indigenous people, large-scale migration means that the non-indigenous population is still growing much more quickly than the Aboriginal population. This paper is older but takes a longer look and seems to indicate that Aboriginal TFR has been falling, along with everybody else's.

If you would like policy to try to increase the non-indigenous birthrate in Australia, and to encourage family formation and children among Australians in general (perhaps specifically white Australians?), then I have no hesitation in supporting that. I think fertility decline is a serious problem across the entire Western world and I expect it to become one of the foremost global crises over the 21st century. So I am wholly behind pro-natalist policy.

I think my position overall, then, is that there is no particular threat of a rapidly expanding Aboriginal population making demands on the Australian welfare system that bankrupts us, but that I support pro-natalist policy regardless, for other reasons.