Why Australians live so long

The Economist has an article on the matter of Australian longevity, noting that Australians outlive their anglophone peers by a significant margin.

Friday, May 30th 2025, 6:18AM

by Russell Hutchinson

The Economist has an article on the matter of Australian longevity, noting that Australians outlive their anglophone peers by a significant margin. In the group of six mainly English-speaking countries, Australia ranks top – outperforming Britain by two years of life expectancy. New Zealand does, on average, just edge out the UK, but only by a matter of months. The United States does far worse, a disappointing outcome for many Americans, especially considering that they spend so much more on healthcare than the average of the other countries in the article.

The full article is brief but worth the read for the analysis of the main drivers of the gap between the different national performances. If you are guessing that firearms deaths are a significant contributor, you are right. Australia’s tough gun laws certainly help, but so does a better environment for treating drug and alcohol dependency, and much better performance in addressing respiratory, heart, and circulatory illness. Although not specifically covered, we think prevention will be at least as significant as a driver compared to treatment. But access to treatment is also better in Australia.

We did a review of how New Zealand life expectancy could be improved, by comparing health outcomes in a variety of leading causes of death with the average and best for countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Although, by comparison with the United States, New Zealanders have much longer life expectancy, there are many other countries where it is higher. We continue to lose many years of life expectancy to treatable conditions.

We examined possible life expectancy gains by comparing death rates for the top ten causes of early death with those in other OECD countries and identifying the gains that could be made by improving mortality to the level of the average of the OECD and the best in the OECD. Improving our performance in diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer, for example, could save hundreds of early deaths each year – more than reducing the road toll – yet we do not hear much about it.

Why do Australians live so long? (economist.com)

Tags: Russell Hutchinson