Australia’s Treasury will publish an intergenerational report Monday projecting that life expectancy at birth will climb to nearly 90 years for women and 86 for men by 2065-66, even as the country’s population growth slows and households shrink.
An extract released Sunday put current life expectancy at about 86 for women and 82 for men, with the newest 40-year projection built around continued advances in Australia’s universal healthcare system. Treasurer Jim Chalmers said Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and the recent expansion of urgent care clinics were the central drivers behind the improving figures, and the report is expected to argue for continued investment in each.
ATN, New York has gathered that the report’s population forecasts diverge notably from Treasury’s own 2023 projections. Population growth is now expected to slow to 0.9% annually over the next four decades, down from 1.4% over the previous 40 years, leaving Australia’s population at roughly 39.3 million by 2065-66, 1.8 million lower than what the previous report forecast. Chalmers attributed much of the shift to declining fertility, saying nearly half the drop stems not from women having no children but from fewer choosing to have three or more, with those who do have children increasingly doing so later in life.
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“Our job is to make it a little bit easier for people to make that choice if they want to,” Chalmers said, pointing to existing Labor government policies that subsidize childcare, expand paid parental leave and raise mandatory superannuation contributions as tools meant to ease that pressure rather than reverse the broader demographic trend.
Chalmers described the report as containing “confronting” elements without characterizing its overall outlook as pessimistic, arguing Australians were comparatively well positioned to absorb the demographic and technological shifts ahead. He delivered that assessment during an appearance on a Sunday political program, where he also detailed the report’s other major theme: artificial intelligence, which Treasury’s analysis identifies as the “defining influence” on Australia’s economy over the coming four decades.
The treasurer said AI carried “very substantial risks” alongside its economic potential and said the government intended to work toward minimizing those risks while capturing the technology’s productivity gains. Treasury’s prior guidance to government had suggested AI could generate meaningful productivity improvements across both the public and private sectors, provided Australia keeps pace with the global shift toward the technology rather than falling behind peer economies.
One bright spot in the report’s fiscal outlook: projected government debt over the coming decades is now expected to run roughly half a trillion dollars lower than the 2023 report anticipated, an improvement Chalmers linked in part to the economic contribution AI is expected to make. “Overwhelmingly, the fiscal story is a little bit better,” Chalmers said, “but still, lots, lots more work to do to manage some of these pressures and risks.”
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The AI theme extends beyond Treasury’s domestic projections into active diplomacy. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is traveling to the United States this week for discussions on what he has described as a “global framework” for AI governance, urging the United States and China, which he called the “big two giants” of the technology, to cooperate in the interest of what he termed humanity’s shared interest rather than compete unchecked.
“We want to see cooperation. We’ve seen that in the past with new technologies, even on nuclear weapons, for example, we saw agreements and protocols put in place through the nuclear non-proliferation treaty,” Albanese said in a broadcast interview Sunday, adding that middle powers such as Australia had a role to play in shaping any resulting framework alongside the two larger economies.
Albanese’s push for international AI cooperation comes as U.S. President Donald Trump has separately signaled plans to appoint an AI coordinator and establish a new federal body he described as an “AI Force” intended to monitor the technology’s development, though he offered few specifics on either initiative. Trump has repeatedly dismissed warnings that AI development poses existential risks as a “hoax,” a characterization that puts Washington’s public posture at odds with the more cautious framing Canberra has adopted in Treasury’s own long-term modeling.
The full intergenerational report is due for release Monday alongside further detail on Treasury’s underlying population, fiscal and technology assumptions.
