Key Points
- Life expectancies have declined for men and women in the last 12 months.
- The Australian Bureau of Statistics says this is because of excess deaths caused by COVID-19.
- Australia has the world’s fourth highest life expectancies.
Australia’s life expectancy from birth has fallen again slightly for the second year and dropped in global rankings.
The life expectancy for an Australian girl born today is 85.1 years, while for a boy it’s 81.1 years, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures released on Friday.
This represents a small decrease of 0.2 years for females and 0.1 for males compared to figures released 12 months ago.
Figures from 2023 showed a drop of 0.1 years for both genders.
A 60-year-old Australian man 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 survive.
Where does Australia rank on life expectancy globally?
Australia has the fourth highest life expectancy at birth amongst OECD countries, equal with Spain at 83.2 years.
Australia was previously sitting above Spain at third place.
Japan at 84.1 years has the highest, followed by Switzerland at 83.7 and South Korea at 83.6.
Life expectancy in all OECD countries dropped slightly as a result of the pandemic. The average is now 81 years.
Human life expectancy at birth rose in high-income nations by approximately 30 years between 1900 and 2000.
However since 1990, improvements overall in life expectancy have decelerated, according to a recent analysis published in Nature magazine.
The article predicts that French people are the most likely to live to 100, with about an 8 per cent chance, while Australians have between a 2 and 3 per cent chance of living to 100.
Why has life expectancy gone backwards?
According to the ABS, life expectancy data has been affected by the excess deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic which started in 2020.
Beidar Cho, ABS head of demography, said: “The years 2021-2023 saw the highest number of COVID-19 deaths with 15,982 in Australia, which was up by 4,100 from 2020-2022.
“Despite the decrease, Australians still have a higher life expectancy than many comparable countries, like New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and Canada.”
The only part of Australia where life expectancy went up in the last 12 months was in the Northern Territory where female life expectancies increased 1.2 years to 80.4 years. For men, they increased 1.5 years to 76.4 years.
However, the Northern Territory has the lowest life expectancy for both men and women.
ACT has the highest at 85.7 for women and 81.7 for men, followed by Western Australia at 85.7 for women and 81.7 for men.
What do we know about life expectancy for young people?
Life expectancies for people under 50 seem to be stagnating at a more concerning rate than for those older, from scientists Sergey Timonin and Tim Adair shows.
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 with the average in 14 other high-income, low-mortality countries from Western Europe (such as France and Norway), plus Japan.
But Australians born in the 1970s onwards had lower life expectancy than the comparison group.
This means overall, life expectancy at birth in Australia is higher than the average for the non-English group. But when broken down by age, the results show a clear distinction in life expectancy according to when you were born.
The authors suggest 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 security of employment and housing, supporting mental health and drug-related safety, and addressing
