The day after the election announcement, several newspapers featured front-page photos of the Prime Minister, garbed all in white, and her (male) deputy - each bearing an exceptionally robust looking, if slightly bemused, white infant in their arms. If the central issue of the election is population, these images of the - reconstructed and thoroughly contemporary - white heterosexual family underscore that the lowering of the birth rate is off the agenda.

The images are a powerful reminder of the importance of the ''natural'' reproduction of the nation, marking the limits of this ''debate'' on population. In fact, of course, far from being simply natural, or a matter of individual choice, the manipulation and regulation of women's fertility - through policies relating to subsidies (the ''baby bonus''), maternity leave, childcare, educational allowances as well as the broader social web of attitudes to sexuality, family and marriage - are all part of what Michel Foucault dubbed biopolitics. The biopolitical, being that which shapes and orders the life and health of the population, is always explicitly or implicitly about shaping and maintaining its racial composition.

The ideal of the remade white heterosexual Australian family represented by Gillard and Wayne Swan at a baby welcome ceremony reaffirms the way in which the reproduction of the population is inextricably bound up with the reproduction of an established political and social order. The image stages an unspoken but unmistakeable return to the defining characteristic of Australia as a nation-state built on whiteness, and dedicated to the reproduction of the racial order established at Federation. Within this order, non-white bodies may be present, and even attain positions of relative power and prominence; however, their presence is one that must remain subject to continuing containment, subordination or assimilation.

Although population has been explicitly identified as the defining issue of the 2010 campaign, it is somewhat misleading to assume that this is a first: historically, official inquiries, debates and policies of successive governments have directly and indirectly addressed the issue of population as a question of the racial reproduction of the nation. In 1903, two years after Federation, the NSW Commission into the Decline of the Birthrate linked concern for falling births with the racial ''threat from the north''. In succeeding years, Australia defined itself by practices of social engineering designed to ''breed out the colour'' of certain Aboriginal groups and by programs to promote the fertility of white women while discouraging that of Aboriginal, Asian and Pacific Islander women.

In the postwar period, slogans such as ''populate or perish'' encapsulate the linkage between race and reproduction. These years were marked also by prohibitions against the circulation of racially marked goods and peoples across national borders. Labor's history of protectionism and racially exclusive trade unionism is one part of this story that has been conveniently forgotten, yet such histories return in contemporary form in the restrictions on temporary work visas and international students, as well as the frenzy over boat arrivals.