Oct27
Life expectancy has hit a new high, with typical newborn girls now expected to live to 84.5 and boys to 80.4, up from 83.3 and 78.5 a decade ago according to the new life tables from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
But CEPAR Chief Investigator Peter McDonald, of the University of Melbourne, says these figures are almost certainly underestimates as they assume no improvements over the course of a life.
"They are not any individual's lifetime; they are just telling you the expectation of life you would get if life expectancy didn't change," he said. "And for the last 200 years it has been going up."