Australians are dying less and living sicker, the government's biggest health report finds

Australia's biggest, longest-running national health report — the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's biennial Australia's Health, now in its 20th edition — found that Australians' fatal disease burden fell 10% between 2003 and 2024, while the non-fatal burden of living with illness, injury, or disability rose 7% over the same period [s1]. Fewer people are dying prematurely; more people are living with conditions that don't kill them but do limit their lives.

The shape of the tradeoff

A falling fatal-burden number alongside a rising non-fatal one isn't a contradiction — it's roughly what should happen when medicine gets better at keeping people alive with a chronic condition rather than dying from it, without necessarily curing the condition itself. The AIHW's own framing is exactly that: people are living longer, but a growing share of that extra life is spent managing illness rather than free of it [s1]. Three in five Australians now live with at least one chronic condition [s1] — a figure the report presents as a defining feature of the country's current health profile, not an anomaly.

The generational mental health shift

Among Australians aged 16 to 24, the share diagnosed with a mental health disorder rose from 26% to 39% between 2007 and 2020–2022 [s1] — nearly a 50% relative increase in roughly a decade and a half, concentrated specifically in young adults rather than the population broadly. The report separately notes one in five young people experienced anxiety or depression in the past 12 months [s1]. The available reporting here doesn't itself adjudicate how much of that rise reflects more mental illness occurring versus more of it being diagnosed and reported as awareness and screening improved over the same period — both plausibly contribute, and the report's topline figures don't separate them.

Who gets priced out of care

Cost is increasingly a barrier to basic primary care specifically: 7.7% of Australians who needed to see a GP reported delaying or skipping the visit due to cost, nearly double the 4.1% figure from a decade earlier [s1]. More broadly, one in four people who needed a GP in 2024–25 delayed or didn't go at all, for any reason [s1]. A near-doubling of cost-related delay over ten years, isolated as its own figure rather than folded into the broader "any reason" number, points to affordability specifically — not just availability or scheduling — as a growing barrier to primary care access.

The other numbers in the report

Total health spending reached $270.5 billion in 2023–24, or $10,037 per person, with $44 billion of that — $1,634 per person — paid out of pocket rather than through public or insurance coverage [s1]. Overweight or obesity affects 67% of adults and 27% of children [s1]. The report also documents stark geographic and socioeconomic health inequality: death rates are 1.5 times higher in the lowest socioeconomic areas than the highest, and 1.6 times higher in very remote areas than major cities [s1]. Separately, the AIHW estimates 36% of Australia's total disease burden is preventable through addressing known risk factors [s1] — a figure that puts a rough ceiling on how much of the current burden reflects things current public health policy could still act on, versus disease that isn't attributable to the risk factors this kind of analysis tracks.

What this data can and can't tell you

This is a biennial national report aggregating many separate data sources and surveys, some covering different time windows (the mental health figures run through 2020–22, the GP-access figures through 2024–25) — it's a comprehensive snapshot rather than a single coherent real-time picture, and readers should treat the different statistics as describing overlapping but not identical time periods.

What to watch next

Whether the widening gap between falling fatal burden and rising non-fatal burden continues at the same pace in the next biennial report, and whether the cost-related GP-access barrier — nearly doubled in a decade — keeps climbing or stabilizes as a policy response, if any, takes effect.