Average life expectancy at birth in Australia has dropped to 81.1 years for men and 85.1 years for women in the past 12 months, stats from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has revealed.
This is a decrease of 0.1 years for men and 0.2 years for women in the past year.
But the good news is life expectancy is still generally trending upwards and is still a full year higher for men and 0.8 years higher for women over the past 10 years.
A little over 30 years ago (1993), life expectancy at birth was 75.0 years for males and 80.9 years for females, a gap of 5.9 years. The life expectancy gap between genders today is 4.0 years.
Life expectancy was highest for males (81.7 years) in the ACT and for females (85.7 years) in both the ACT and WA.
It was lowest for both males (76.4 years) and females (80.4 years) in the NT, 4.7 years lower than the Australian average.
Life expectancy decreased across all states and territories for females and all but the NT for males, which recorded a 0.2-year increase.
The ABS says that as this year’s numbers cover the period from 2021-2023 (last year’s covered 2020-2022) the dip is still mostly due to excess deaths caused by COVID.
“In 2022, Australia’s pattern of mortality differed to that of the first two years of the pandemic and the number of deaths increased by almost 20,000 deaths from 2021, with almost half of these being due to COVID-19,” the ABS says.
The dips are concerning but we do seem to be largely on the right track still. It will be interesting to see what happens to life expectancy once the COVID years are taken out of the count in future.
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