KEY POINTS:
Australian toddlers can now expect to spend more than a year longer on this earth than their New Zealand counterparts.
This reverses the trend of the 1960s and 1970s, when the lucky country's life expectancy at birth was shorter than New Zealand's. Australia pulled ahead in 1980 and held a lead of 1.3 years in 2005, according to the latest international comparison by the OECD.
Australia had the fourth-longest life outlook and New Zealand was 11th of 30 countries, at 79.6 years, while the OECD average was 78.6.
New Zealand health ministers like to highlight this higher-than-average placing when challenged over their country's lower-than-average health spending per capita.
Transtasman rivalry aside, life expectancy has risen dramatically in both countries and most OECD nations in the past 40 years through improvements in lifestyle, nutrition, housing, healthcare and education.
But despite these improvements, significant disparities remain in this country: women live longer than men and Pakeha live longer than Maori and Pacific people.
Looking at the total population, a 2005 baby's life outlook was 8.3 years longer than one born in 1960. But if the 2005 baby was a girl, its life expectancy was 81.7, compared with 77.5 for a boy, a difference of 4.2 years. The OECD report gives no ethnic breakdown, but Statistics NZ figures predict a lifespan of 69 years for a Maori boy born between 2000 and 2002 - 8.2 years less than for a non-Maori male. The disparity for females is 8.7 years.
"Those are substantial differences," Auckland University epidemiologist Professor Rod Jackson said yesterday. "They reflect worse birth statistics, a greater rate of injury, and cardiovascular disease."
Maori had higher cardiovascular risks from higher rates of smoking and diabetes, although their risks from lipid levels (including cholesterol) and blood pressure were not greatly different.
From the 1940s to the 60s, improvements in life expectancy were driven by reductions in infant mortality, Professor Jackson said. Then from the 1970s the reductions in heart disease and stroke mortality took over, arising from declining smoking rates and reduced intakes of saturated fat from dairy foods, especially butter.
The Health Ministry's chief clinical adviser, Dr Sandy Dawson, said a range of improvements in medical care had contributed to the reduction in heart disease mortality, such as the introduction of medicines to lower cholesterol, new ones for blood pressure, more hospital treatment and cardiac rehab after a heart attack.
He was unsure why Australia's life expectancy was higher, but suggested it might be partly be because its indigenous population was a smaller proportion of the total than in New Zealand.
Declining infant mortality improves life expectancy, and while New Zealand's infant mortality continues to reduce, it has done so more slowly than in most OECD countries.
The ministry's chief adviser on child and youth health, Dr Pat Tuohy, said New Zealand's OECD ranking for infant mortality at better than 10th lowest in 1970, slipped to among the worst a decade later because of an epidemic of cot deaths.
We had slowly improved since the back-to-sleep campaign began in the 1990s and after improvements in neonatal and maternity care.
