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Australia’s life expectancy has fallen again and it has fallen in global rankings. Here’s why

Online Niel November 9, 2024

Key points

Life expectancy has fallen for men and women over the past 12 months.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics says this is due to excess deaths from COVID-19.
Australia has the fourth highest life expectancy in the world.

Australia’s life expectancy at birth has fallen slightly again for a second year and has fallen in global rankings.

Life expectancy for an Australian girl born today is 85.1 years, while for a boy it is 81.1 years, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures released on Friday.

This is a small drop of 0.2 years for women and 0.1 for men compared to figures published 12 months ago.

The 2023 figures showed a decrease of 0.1 years for both sexes.

An Australian man aged 60 can expect to live another 24.2 years and a woman another 27.1 years, which is longer than life expectancy at birth because the first decades of life are harder to survived.

Where does Australia rank in terms of life expectancy globally?

Australia has the fourth highest life expectancy at birth among OECD countries, tied with Spain at 83.2 years.

Australia previously sat above Spain in third place.

Japan at 84.1 years has the highest, followed by Switzerland at 83.7 and South Korea at 83.6.

Source: SBS News

Life expectancy in all OECD countries fell slightly as a result of the pandemic. The average is now 81 years.

Human life expectancy at birth increased in high-income countries by about 30 years between 1900 and 2000.

However, since 1990, overall improvements in life expectancy have slowed, according to a recent analysis published in the journal Nature.

The article predicts that the French are the most likely to live to 100, with about an 8% chance, while Australians have a 2 to 3% chance of living to 100.

Why has life expectancy fallen back?

According to the ABS, life expectancy data was affected by excess deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020.

ABS head of demography Beidar Cho said: “The years 2021-2023 saw the highest number of deaths from COVID-19 with 15,982 in Australia, which was up by 4,100 on 2020-2022.

“Despite the decline, Australians still have a higher life expectancy than many comparable countries such as New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.”

The only part of Australia where life expectancy increased over the past 12 months was in the Northern Territory, where female life expectancy rose by 1.2 years to 80.4 years. For men, they increased by 1.5 years to 76.4 years.

However, the Northern Territory has the lowest life expectancy for both men and women.

The ACT has the highest 85.7 for women and 81.7 for men, followed by Western Australia with 85.7 for women and 81.7 for men.

What do we know about young people’s life expectancy?

Life expectancy for people under 50 appears to be stagnating at a more worrying rate than for older people, from the shows of scientists Sergey Timonin and Tim Adair.

Australians born from the 1930s to the 1960s are likely to live longer than those in a non-English-speaking comparison group and all other English-speaking countries, they wrote in The Conversation.

The comparison group was the average of 14 other high-income, low-mortality countries in Western Europe (such as France and Norway), plus Japan.

But Australians born since the 1970s had a lower life expectancy than the comparison group.

This means that overall life expectancy at birth in Australia is higher than the average for the non-English group. But broken down by age, the results show a clear distinction in life expectancy depending on when you were born.

The authors suggest that real improvement could come through measures that reduce inequality and structural disadvantages that lead to poor health outcomes, such as improving access to education and job and housing security, supporting mental health and drug safety, and addressing