Elon Musk issues a dire warning to Australians

Outspoken billionaire Elon Musk has warned Australians about the nation’s declining birth and fertility rate.

The Tesla founder took to social media on Thursday to speak out on new data showing Australia’s birthrate had fallen to an all-time low as a growing number of couples and women decide to have children later in life.

There were 286,998 births registered in Australia in 2023, a 4.6 per cent decrease from the 300,684 registered in 2022, representing a fertility rate of 1.5 babies per woman, also down from a previous low of 1.65 in 2022.

It was the lowest number of births since 2007, when Australia’s population had at least two million fewer people.

Responding to the figures, Musk wrote: ‘Birth rates continue to plummet. Population collapse is coming.

Musk, a father of 12, has been warning for years about declining birth rates in developed nations, and said the trend poses a significant risk to humanity.

‘Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming,’ he said in 2022.

Musk said: ‘A lot of people are under the impression that the current number of humans is unsustainable on the planet.

‘That is totally untrue. The population density is actually quite low.’

Australia’s fertility rate has been  declining since hitting a peak 3.5 babies per mother in 1961

Musk and other concerned experts fear societies will end up with ‘more grandparents than grandchildren’ and face a ‘myriad’ of challenges, such as too few younger people to work, pay taxes and look after the elderly.

Emeritus Professor of Demography Peter McDonald from the Australian National University in Canberra stated that there are several reasons why young Australian women are delaying having children.

‘Establishing themselves in career, younger people have been putting off life and settling down, by staying in education longer, by travelling and all of those things lead to things occurring later.

‘We can’t delay births until women are in their 40s or else we will have no births,’ he said.

The professor said governments could pull two policy levers to increase fertility rates.

‘One is affordable housing, and the other is affordable childcare,’ he said.

‘It takes a long time to deal with affordable housing, but they could deal with affordable childcare.’

Despite Australia’s fertility rate plummeting to a record low, the government is not considering a revival of the baby bonus.

‘It’s not something that we’ve been discussing. I’m interested, obviously, in the figures,’ deputy prime minister Richard Marles told Seven’s Sunrise program on Thursday.

‘We want to do what we can to make it easier for families and couples to have children and we are doing that. It is important that we have a sustainable birth rate.’

The baby bonus was set up by the Howard government and gave $3000 lump sum payments to new parents of children born from July 2004.

Then-treasurer Peter Costello urged families to ‘have one for mum, one for dad and one for the country’.