Australians are expected to live into their mid-to-late 80s within the next few generations, but achieving healthier longer lives will depend on getting the nation’s health policies right.
Treasury’s latest Intergenerational Report, due to be released in full on Monday, will examine how government decisions could shape Australia over the next 40 years.
An extract published on Sunday projected that female life expectancy at birth would approach 90 by 2065/66, compared with about 86 years today.
For men, life expectancy is forecast to climb from 82 years currently to 86 over the same period.
If those forecasts are realised, Australia will retain its position among the countries with the world’s highest life expectancies.
Australian Medical Association president Danielle McMullen described the projected increase as evidence of policy success, while cautioning that longer lives must also be healthier ones.
“Over the last few generations we’re living longer, but we’re also living more years in ill health with chronic disease or mental illness,” she told ABC News on Sunday.
“That’s certainly something as doctors we would want to turn around and make sure people are staying healthy as well as living longer lives.”
Jim Chalmers (pictured) said the report was “confronting” in some cases but not pessimistic
Dr McMullen said Australia needed to place greater emphasis on preventive care, arguing that regular contact with doctors earlier in life could help limit chronic illness in later years.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the report strengthened the case for continued investment in Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and the expansion of urgent care clinics.
At the same time, Chalmers told News24’s Sunday Agenda program that an expanding and ageing population would remain a major source of pressure on the federal budget over the long term.
“There are elements of the intergenerational report which are confronting, but it’s not a pessimistic report … because Australians are genuinely better placed and better prepared for all of this accelerating change that we are seeing,” he said.
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Treasury also expects Australia’s population to be modestly smaller by the middle of the 2060s than it predicted in the 2023 Intergenerational Report.
Annual population growth is forecast to slow to 0.9 per cent over the next four decades, down from an average of 1.4 per cent over the previous 40 years.
The population is now projected to reach 39.3 million in 2065/66—1.8 million fewer people than the estimate published in 2023.
Treasury attributed much of the slowdown to declining fertility rates, as women continue to have fewer children.
Australia’s population is expected to fall short of the projection in the 2023 Intergenerational Report. Pictured, commuters at Parramatta train station
“Almost half the decline in fertility rates is actually because fewer people are having three or more kids and what that reflects is mums having fewer kids later in life,” Chalmers said.
He said the government’s role was to make parenthood more achievable for those who wanted it, pointing to Labor policies including subsidised childcare, expanded paid parental leave and higher compulsory superannuation contributions.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor said young families should be able to have confidence they could afford to have children, but the Coalition had no plans to revive the Howard and Costello-era ‘baby bonus’ policy.
Future government debt is expected to be slashed by half a trillion dollars compared to forecasts in the 2023 report, but much of the economic progress relies on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
‘Overwhelmingly, the fiscal story is a little bit better; but still, lots, lots more work to do to manage some of these pressures and risks,’ Chalmers said.
Previous Treasury advice suggested AI could provide significant productivity gains across the public and private sectors if the nation kept pace with the global shift towards the technology.
Mr Taylor said Labor would ‘cook the books’ and rely on rosy productivity assumptions to deliver better-than-expected budget forecasts.