Breaking: Australians Are Better Than Everybody Else

From today's (actually, tomorrow's) Sydney Morning Herald. (But is spending more on health care necessarily a good indicator of progress?)


Australia: In your face, world
By David Dale and Jessica Irvine
July 13, 2005

Goodbye, cultural cringe. Australians are smarter, healthier, and busier than most of the world, the Social Trends report from the Bureau of Statistics suggests.

At school our teenagers can read, count and understand scientific concepts better than the teens of the US, Sweden France and Italy.

We spend more on health per citizen ($3300 a year) than the people of Japan, Italy, Britain and New Zealand. Possibly because of this, the life expectancy of a child born now (78 for boys and 83 for girls) is higher than in Canada, Britain, New Zealand and the US.


IK note: Life expectancy for Aborigine men is only 57 years, 19 years less than for non-natives. Infant mortality for Aborigine babies is more than three times higher.


Our unemployment rate (6 per cent) is the same as America's and lower than that of France, Italy and Canada. Our median age (37) is younger than that of Canada, Italy, Britain, Sweden, Singapore, and Japan.

Australian teenagers performed in tests conducted as part of the Program for International Student Assessment, and from the results the bureau found that "Australian 15-year-olds performed well when compared with 41 OECD and other countries across both maths and science scores. Australia's mean score of 524 in mathematical literacy and 525 in scientific literacy placed it above the OECD average of 500 for each skill, and in the top third of countries."

And where other countries (notably South Korea, New Zealand and Canada) experience a marked difference in ability between boys and girls, the bureau notes "there were no significant sex differences in scores for Australian 15-year-olds".

OK, enough smugness. We still have a way to go: the babies of Japan and Hong Kong will live longer than ours; Britain, Sweden and New Zealand have a better employment rate; because of our low birth rate, we're older than Malaysia and Indonesia; and the maths and science geeks of Hong Kong, Japan and Korea beat the pants off our geeks.

The Social Trends 2005 report also offered these good news/ bad news scenarios:

■ Household wealth is increasing, but not togetherness. The bureau predicts that by 2026 the proportion of Australians living as couples with children will drop from 52 per cent to about 40 per cent; one-parent families will rise from 11 per cent to 15 per cent of the population; and those living alone will rise from 9 per cent to 13 per cent. And 24 per cent of women now of childbearing age will never have children.

■ The number of children aged 1-14 who die as a result of injuries has halved since the 1980s. But injury is still the main cause of death among children, with 230 fatalities every year, two thirds of them boys. Most fatalities are caused by transport accidents and drowning, while falls, collisions and bites cause the most non-fatal injuries.

■ Opportunities for Aborigines have improved significantly. The proportion of indigenous people with a qualification outside school has risen from 19 per cent in 1994 to 29 per cent in 2002 and the unemployment rate has dropped from 30 per cent to 20 per cent. But the imprisonment rate for Aborigines is still 1417 per 100,000, compared with 129 for non indigenous people; and Aborigines are 1½ times more likely to have health problems than non-indigenous people.

■ We are more conscious of water. Ninety per cent of households report using a water-saving device, and the proportion of homes with dual flush toilets rose from 39 per cent to 74 per cent between 1994 and 2004. But it is forecast that Australia will need 28 per cent more water by 2026.

■ Young people are more at risk of falling through the cracks. One in three school-leavers last year were not in full-time education, employment, or a mix of the two. Young women and rural residents were more prone to this than young men and city dwellers. Almost four out of five of disengaged young women said their main activity was housework or caring for children, compared with 10 per cent of young men.

The proportion of school leavers going straight into higher education rose from one in four in 1984 to four in 10 in 2004. Youth unemployment has halved since 1994.