The Health Emergency

The second emergency. Australians are dying of conditions driven by what they eat, drink, breathe and absorb — and cannot find out what is in any of it. Eight national agencies and eight state regimes check pieces of the problem. None of them owns it. Companion to Memo 14, The Quiet Emergency, which covers the first.

1. The numbers

• 187,268 Australians died in 2024. Dementia was the leading cause at 17,549 deaths, or 9.4 per cent, followed by ischaemic heart disease at 16,275.
• Grouped together rather than split by site, cancer is the largest killer: an estimated 53,545 deaths in 2025, around three in every ten deaths.
• Overweight and obesity was the leading risk factor contributing to ill health and death in Australia in 2024.
• Two in three adults — 67 per cent — were living with overweight or obesity in 2022–24. Obesity alone rose from 31 to 33 per cent, and abdominal obesity from 41 to 48 per cent.
• 27 per cent of children aged 2 to 17 are living with overweight or obesity.
• Cancer incidence rose from 476 to 609 cases per 100,000 between 1982 and 2021, while cancer mortality fell from 257 to an estimated 194 per 100,000 between 2000 and 2025.
• Cancer is becoming more commonly diagnosed in people in their 30s and 40s.
• Coronary heart disease mortality has fallen by nearly 90 per cent since it peaked in 1968, to 43.4 per 100,000 — the lowest since records began.
• Dementia deaths have risen 160 per cent since 2006. 425,000 Australians are living with dementia, projected to exceed one million by 2065.
• Australia has the highest rate of early-onset bowel cancer in the world. Incidence among under-50s is rising by up to 8 per cent a year.
• Colorectal cancer became the deadliest cancer for Australians aged 25 to 44 in 2025.
• Bowel cancer incidence is three to four times higher among Australians born in the 1980s than among those born in the 1950s.
• 60 per cent of Australia's 45 highest-volume pesticides are banned in the European Union. Only 16 per cent retain full international approval.
• When drinking water guidelines were corrected in June 2025, approximately 73,000 Australians were found to have been drinking water above the new PFAS limits, many for years.
• PFAS is a class of more than 4,000 manufactured chemicals. Australia has guideline values for five of them.
• 16 of 20 sunscreens tested by a consumer organisation failed to meet their labelled SPF. One labelled SPF50+ tested at SPF4.
• Around 10,000 complementary medicines are on the Australian market. They are not evaluated before sale, and the regulator reviews several hundred a year.
• Two-thirds of Australians use complementary medicines.
• 130 of the 471 glyphosate products registered in Australia in 2016 were for home garden use.
• Computed tomography accounts for about 10 per cent of radiological examinations and more than 60 per cent of collective radiation dose. Australia has no national imaging dose registry.
• More than 70 per cent of Australia's primary produce is exported.

2. How Australians die

The published ranking of causes of death is accurate and misleading at the same time, and both halves matter.

In 2024, dementia became Australia's leading cause of death for the first time — 17,549 deaths, 9.4 per cent of the total — overtaking ischaemic heart disease at 16,275. Chronic lower respiratory disease was third for the first time since 1996, ahead of stroke and lung cancer, with barely a hundred deaths separating third from fifth.

Two long curves crossed to produce that result. Dementia deaths have risen more than 160 per cent since 2006, from 6,550 to 17,549. Heart disease deaths have fallen 29.6 per cent over the same period, and the age-standardised rate is now the lowest recorded since collection began in 1968. One of those is a public health achievement. The other is largely demographic: 68.2 per cent of deaths are now people aged over 75, against 63.3 per cent twenty years ago.

Cancer is hidden by the way the list is built. The Bureau ranks by specific cause, so cancers appear separately by site — lung, bowel, blood, prostate, breast, pancreas. Added together they are an estimated 53,545 deaths in 2025, roughly three in every ten. Cancer is the largest cause of death in Australia and does not appear at the top of any table.

And there is a second ranking that changes the picture entirely. Total years of potential life lost in 2024 was 1,009,187. Measured that way — by life cut short rather than deaths counted — suicide is the leading cause of premature death and coronary heart disease is second.

Read together, the two rankings say something precise. Australians die old of dementia and heart failure, and die young of despair and heart disease. The first emergency and the second are the two ends of the same list.

3. Cancer

Australia is getting steadily better at not dying of cancer, and steadily more likely to get it.

Mortality is falling and the trend is unambiguous: the age-standardised cancer death rate dropped from 257 to an estimated 194 per 100,000 between 2000 and 2025, and five-year survival rose from 50 per cent to 72 per cent over three decades. Prostate cancer mortality fell from 63 to 33 per 100,000, breast cancer from 38 to 22.

Incidence moved the other way, from 476 cases per 100,000 in 1982 to 609 in 2021. About 170,000 new cases are expected in 2025, and close to a million Australians have been diagnosed in the past decade.

The finding that should be driving national research is this one. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare states that cancer is becoming more commonly diagnosed in people in their 30s and 40s. An ageing population does not explain a rise among people in their thirties. Early-onset cancer is increasing across comparable countries and the cause is not established.

Australia has no national program investigating it.

Bowel cancer in the young

Australia has the highest rate of early-onset bowel cancer in the world. Early-onset means diagnosis before 50.

Incidence among Australians under 50 is rising by up to 8 per cent a year. Among over-50s it is stabilising or falling, a change attributed to population screening. Colorectal cancer became the deadliest cancer for Australians aged 25 to 44 in 2025.

Among people aged 20 to 29 the rate rose from 2.2 to an estimated 4.6 cases per 100,000 between 2000 and 2025. Among adolescents and young adults aged 15 to 24 the increase over three decades is 266 per cent. One in eight people diagnosed with bowel cancer in Australia is under 50.

A University of Melbourne analysis of all Australian cancer registries from 1990 to 2020 recorded 28,265 early-onset cases, of which an estimated 4,347 were attributable to the rising rate. Early-onset incidence rose 5 to 9 per cent annually, producing 5,341 excess cases: 45 per cent colon, 36 per cent rectum, 12 per cent appendix, 7 per cent anus.

Research published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in May 2026 projects that on current trends early-onset bowel cancer rates will double approximately every 20 years in Australia, Canada, England and the United States. The decade trend across those countries is 3.7 per cent a year, and 7 per cent a year among adults aged 20 to 39 — 8.4 per cent among women in that group.

The pattern is generational. Bowel cancer incidence is three to four times higher among Australians born in the 1980s than among those born in the 1950s.

The researchers state that the cause is unknown, that increasing risk factor exposure among younger generations is hypothesised, and that generational shifts suggest evolving risk factor profiles and early-life exposures, highlighting the need to identify drivers.

The screening age was lowered from 50 to 45 in July 2024. Participation in the national program was 41.7 per cent in 2022–23.

Melanoma

Melanoma is the counter-example and the proof of concept. Incidence rose from 54 to an estimated 63 cases per 100,000 between 2000 and 2025 — but mortality peaked at 8.0 per 100,000 in 2013 and has fallen to an estimated 5.3, with rates now stabilising among the Australians who grew up with SunSmart. Two in three Australians will have a skin cancer, and skin cancers are about 80 per cent of all new cancer diagnoses. It remains the most preventable cancer burden in the world, and the campaign worked.

4. Obesity

Overweight and obesity was the leading risk factor contributing to ill health and death in Australia in 2024. Not one of several. The leading one.

Two in three adults — 67 per cent — were living with overweight or obesity in the 2022–24 measured survey, against 56 per cent in 1995. Obesity alone rose from 31 to 33 per cent, a statistically significant increase, and abdominal obesity from 41 to 48 per cent. Among children aged 2 to 17, 27 per cent are living with overweight or obesity and 8.5 per cent with obesity.

The childhood figure has not moved significantly since 2017–18. The adult figures have moved the wrong way. The national target is to reduce childhood overweight and obesity by 5 per cent by 2030, and Australia is not on track to meet it.

Australia ranks 10th of 38 OECD countries, above the OECD average.

This is the hinge of the whole memo. Obesity is not a cosmetic problem or a matter of individual discipline. It is the largest single contributor to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, musculoskeletal conditions and several cancers — which is to say it sits upstream of most of section 2. And it is driven by what is in the food supply, which is the subject of section 7.

5. Dementia and heart disease

Dementia. 425,000 Australians were living with dementia in 2024, projected to exceed one million by 2065. It is the leading cause of death overall, the leading cause of death for women since 2016, and 62.4 per cent of those who die of it are women. It accounts for around 262,000 healthy years of life lost — 4.5 per cent of the total disease burden — and is the leading cause of disease burden for everyone aged 80 and over.

One caveat belongs in the memo because the agency itself states it: part of the measured increase reflects changes in how dementia deaths are coded, not only more dementia.

Heart disease. Coronary heart disease remains the leading cause of death for men, at 10,153 deaths in 2024, and the leading cause of death in outer regional, remote and very remote Australia. It is the leading cause of total disease burden, and the second leading cause of premature death after suicide.

It is also the strongest argument in this memo. Coronary heart disease mortality has fallen by nearly 90 per cent since it peaked in 1968. Smoking rates, blood pressure control, statins, surgical technique, ambulance response and public education each contributed. Australia decided to reduce a leading cause of death and reduced it by nine tenths across two generations.

Anyone arguing that a national effort cannot shift a chronic disease has to explain that number.

6. The gradient

Every disease in this memo follows the same map, and it is the map from Memo 14.

• 70 per cent of adults in the most disadvantaged areas live with overweight or obesity, against 62 per cent in the most advantaged. For obesity alone the gap is 36 to 38 per cent against 25 to 23 per cent.
• Children in the lowest socioeconomic areas are more than twice as likely to be living with obesity as those in the highest — 11 per cent against 4.4 per cent.
• 74 per cent of adults in outer regional and remote Australia live with overweight or obesity, against 65 per cent in major cities.
• Coronary heart disease is the leading cause of death in outer regional, remote and very remote Australia.
• Among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults the figure is 74 per cent, against 66 per cent for non-Indigenous adults, and 38 per cent of First Nations children aged 2 to 17.
• The leading causes of death for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in 2024 were ischaemic heart disease, chronic lower respiratory disease, diabetes, lung cancer and suicide — a younger and more preventable profile than the national one.

The same postcodes appear in the suicide data, the overdose data, the homelessness data and the obesity data. Whatever is happening to Australians is happening hardest to the same Australians.

7. What we eat

Australia's food supply is the largest single input to the leading risk factor for death in this country, and Australians cannot reliably establish what is in it.

On 27 July 2026 the ABC's Four Corners broadcast the first part of a two-part investigation by Adele Ferguson, the result of eight months of work with forensic food scientists who commissioned extensive laboratory testing of everyday supermarket products. The findings raised questions about food authenticity, misleading origin claims and undeclared ingredients in common pantry items. The second part follows the supply chains offshore.

The significant fact is not any individual product. It is that the testing was commissioned by a journalist.

The international parallel is running at the same time. In June 2026 Taiwan discovered that cooking oil produced by Central Union Oil Corp contained benzo[a]pyrene, a Group 1 carcinogen, at four times the legal limit — a limit identical to the European standard. About 1,300 tonnes had reached 360 downstream businesses. The recall grew to 401 products, from packaged chicken to instant noodles to convenience store meals, affecting more than 13,000 businesses across all 22 counties and municipalities.

The timeline is the lesson. A downstream customer detected the problem in May. The producer was informed on 11 June and did not notify authorities until 30 June — nineteen days. The company was fined NT$165.2 million for failing to report, executives were detained, and the Taiwanese cabinet approved amendments to the food safety act within three weeks covering source management, process controls, mandatory abnormality reporting and digital traceability.

Taiwan has batch-level traceability, mandatory reporting with criminal penalties, and a regulator able to order a company to stop manufacturing. Its system still took nineteen days. Australia has no equivalent machinery, and its food integrity problem surfaced because a television program paid for laboratory tests.

8. What we drink

In June 2025 the National Health and Medical Research Council revised the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines for PFAS. The limit for PFOS fell from 70 nanograms per litre to 8. The limit for PFOA fell from 560 to 200.

Nothing about the water changed. The number changed, and approximately 73,000 Australians were retrospectively found to have been drinking water above the safety guideline, many for years and possibly decades: 41,000 in the Blue Mountains, 10,000 in Ayr, 10,000 in Katherine, 5,500 in Narrabri, 3,330 in Bundaberg.

Three further facts complete the picture.

• The Blue Mountains contamination, from legacy firefighting foam, went undetected until 2024.
• PFBA returns the highest PFAS detections of any such compound in the Sydney region and has no Australian drinking water guideline at all.
• PFAS is a class of more than 4,000 manufactured chemicals that do not occur in nature. Australia has health-based guideline values for five.

Routine testing outside metropolitan water utilities is limited, and a single low result has often been used to justify not including PFAS in ongoing monitoring. The guidelines themselves do not guarantee compliance at a household tap.

A citizen who wants to know what is in their own water supply, in most of the country, cannot find out.

Fluoride is added deliberately, and the evidence base moved in 2024. In August 2024 the United States National Toxicology Program concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher fluoride exposure — drinking water above 1.5 milligrams per litre — is associated with lower IQ in children. In January 2025 a meta-analysis in JAMA Pediatrics synthesised 74 studies published between 1989 and 2023 and reported an inverse association between fluoride exposure and children's IQ scores, which held when restricted to high-quality studies.

The same program stated that there were insufficient data to determine whether the lower level recommended for community water supplies affects children's IQ, and found no evidence of adverse effects on adult cognition. Its authors acknowledged that many included studies carried a high risk of bias, and an independent National Academies committee criticised the monograph.

A 2023 meta-analysis found no association at community fluoridation levels, and a 2021 review found the inverse association was strongest in studies at high risk of bias. The journal published opposing editorials. The American Dental Association states the findings do not warrant changing fluoridation practice.

Two facts are not in dispute. The review assessed total fluoride exposure from all sources, not fluoridated water alone. And no Australian agency measures total fluoride intake — water, toothpaste, dental treatments, food and tea combined.

The question is open. Australia does not hold the data that would close it.

9. What we take

Sunscreen. In June 2025 the consumer organisation CHOICE tested 20 sunscreens labelled SPF50 or higher. Sixteen failed to meet their claim. The worst, labelled SPF50+, tested at SPF4, and returned a similar figure at a second laboratory. The brands included Bondi Sands, Banana Boat, Nivea and the Cancer Council's own product.

In February 2025 the regulator's position was that Australians could have confidence in listed sunscreens. By September it had raised concerns about 20 products. In December the Cancer Council's children's sunscreen was recalled. Subsequently nearly 20 further brands were withdrawn after the Therapeutic Goods Administration identified significant concerns about a single base formula, supplied by one laboratory and used in dozens of sunscreens, which preliminary testing indicated was unlikely to exceed SPF21 while being sold as SPF50+.

Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world. Listed sunscreens are self-certified by their sponsors; the regulator does not test them before listing. One manufacturer disputes the finding and points to its own testing, which is a fair objection and is noted.

Supplements and complementary medicines. Around 10,000 are on the Australian market and two-thirds of Australians use them. Listed medicines — approximately 98 per cent of the category — are not evaluated before sale. The regulator does not assess the efficacy evidence, does not examine the final product, and does not examine the label. The system runs on self-assessment by sponsors, with post-market review of several hundred products a year.

When those reviews have been conducted, the results have been poor. A departmental review found as many as 90 per cent of products examined were non-compliant with regulatory requirements.

Of 31 randomly selected medicines, 20 had labelling problems including breaches capable of misleading consumers, 22 had manufacturing or quality issues, and 14 held inadequate evidence for the claims on the packet. More recently the regulator found imported melatonin supplements containing significantly more or less than the labelled amount, and removed four vitamin D products making bone-strength claims for want of evidence.

Nothing in this section is advice about any individual product, and no one should stop a treatment on the strength of it. The point is narrower and harder: an Australian buying these products has no way to verify what is in them, and neither, before sale, does the state.

10. What we spray

Researchers at Griffith University analysed Australia's 45 highest-volume pesticides and published the results in March 2026. Sixty per cent are banned in the European Union. A further 24 per cent are approved in Europe but banned in at least one other country. Sixteen per cent retain full international approval.

Four in particular are banned in dozens of countries and remain legal here: paraquat, atrazine, methomyl and chlorpyrifos.

Paraquat is the case that illustrates the regulatory posture. It is banned in more than 70 countries including the European Union, the United Kingdom and China, and has been under review by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority since 1997.

On 23 June 2026 the authority decided it would remain legal with tighter restrictions — maximum application rates cut from 1,150 to 231 grams per hectare, backpack spraying phased out, enclosed mixing and loading required — finding that the weight of evidence does not show that approved use increases the risk of Parkinson's disease.

More than forty Australian neurologists and movement disorder specialists had signed a submission calling for a ban. Parkinson's Australia described the decision as shocking.

Glyphosate is the case that illustrates how long an approval lasts. Sold as Roundup, it was first registered in Australia in the 1970s. As at February 2016 there were 471 registered products containing it, of which 130 were for home garden use.

In March 2015 the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans, in the same review that classified malathion and diazinon. The Australian regulator assessed that monograph and concluded in 2016 that glyphosate does not pose a carcinogenic risk and that a formal reconsideration was not required. Its stated basis is that the agency's classification is a hazard assessment rather than a risk assessment.

That position has not been revisited. It predates the United States litigation record, in which approximately 181,000 claims are pending, and it predates the February 2025 ruling of Canada's Federal Court that Health Canada's 2022 approval of a glyphosate-based product was unreasonable because the agency had failed to conduct a proper assessment.

The framing that matters here is that this is being done to farmers, not by them. The same research notes that global chemical companies have been slow to register newer and potentially safer alternatives in Australia, leaving Australian producers dependent on legacy chemicals while the manufacturers preserve a market for products no longer viable elsewhere. Australian farmers are buying what the rest of the world has stopped using, because nobody has registered them anything better.

And there is a commercial exposure. More than 70 per cent of Australia's primary produce is exported, and continued use of chemicals banned in destination markets complicates that trade. Cleaning up the chemical base is not a cost imposed on agriculture. It is the protection of its markets.

11. What is in the house

Domestic chemical exposure is the least regulated category in this memo, because it is the least disclosed.

Food carries a mandatory ingredient list. Therapeutic goods carry an approved-ingredient framework and an entry on a public register. Household cleaning products, air fresheners, pest control products, cosmetics and personal care products do not carry a comparable requirement to disclose their full composition to the person buying them.

Industrial chemicals are regulated at the point of introduction into Australia, through an assessment scheme that determines whether a chemical may be imported or manufactured. That is a different question from what a consumer is told is in the bottle.

Of the 471 glyphosate products registered in Australia in 2016, 130 were for home garden use. The same chemicals discussed in section 10 are sold in domestic quantities to people who have no training, no protective equipment and no exposure record.

Three consequences follow.

• Cumulative household exposure is unmeasured. A person's total load from cleaning products, treatments applied inside the home, personal care products and garden chemicals is not recorded by any agency.
• Combination effects are unassessed. Chemicals are approved individually. Nobody assesses what a set of them does together, in an enclosed space, over years.
• Children carry the highest exposure per kilogram of body weight and spend the most time indoors.

The disclosure rule this memo proposes applies here in its simplest form. If a product is sold for use in an Australian home, its full composition is published.

12. What we are scanned with

Diagnostic imaging saves lives, and nothing in this section is an argument against having a scan a doctor has recommended. It is an argument about measurement.

Two studies published in 2025 quantified the risk. An analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine estimated that approximately 103,000 future cancers could result from computed tomography examinations performed in the United States in 2023.

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine followed 3.7 million children across six United States health systems and Ontario for an average of 10.1 years, demonstrating a dose-response relationship between imaging radiation and cancer risk, with measurably increased risk at a bone marrow dose of 15 to 30 milligray — equivalent to one or two head CT scans.

Computed tomography accounts for about 10 per cent of radiological examinations and more than 60 per cent of collective radiation dose.

The identified problem is unjustified examinations rather than imaging itself. A seven-country European audit found that nearly a quarter of CT referrals did not meet evidence-based guidelines, with rates between 16 and 32 per cent. Between 25 and 30 per cent of CT scans performed on children for minor head injuries are assessed as unnecessary despite published clinical guidelines.

Nuclear medicine adds a further dose. A whole-body PET/CT study with low-dose CT delivers an effective dose of about 7 millisieverts, rising to as much as 30 millisieverts where a high-resolution diagnostic CT is included. Published dosimetry for prostate cancer tracers records effective doses of about 21 millisieverts per examination.

Japan has established national diagnostic reference levels for nuclear medicine, including for the CT components of PET/CT and SPECT/CT, and revises them periodically.

Australia has no national dose registry. No Australian is told their cumulative lifetime imaging dose, and no agency holds it.

13. Who is supposed to be checking

This is the structural finding, and it is the same one as Memo 14.

Eight national bodies across three portfolios, and eight separate state and territory regimes. Each is competent within its own boundary. No one is responsible for the question an ordinary person actually asks, which is what is going into me and my children.

The consequence is visible in who finds the problems. A consumer organisation tested the sunscreens. A television program paid for the food testing. In Taiwan, a downstream customer found the contaminated oil. In each case the regulator followed the finding rather than making it.

That is not a failure of individual agencies. It is what happens when detection is nobody's specific job.

14. The diagnostic system

Autism belongs in this memo, but not as a disease, and the distinction is important enough to state plainly. Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition and autistic Australians are not a burden of disease. What is in crisis is the system built around diagnosis.

The numbers are clear. There were 290,900 autistic Australians in 2022, 1.1 per cent of the population, up 41.8 per cent from 205,200 in 2018. Among children aged 5 to 14 the figure is 4.3 per cent, up from 3.2 per cent. More than one in 25 children aged 7 to 14 is now diagnosed. Participants with autism rose from 34 per cent of the National Disability Insurance Scheme in 2022 to 40 per cent in 2025.

Research published in 2026 found that the NDIS itself caused approximately a 32 per cent increase in measured autism prevalence, most likely because clinicians lowered the diagnostic threshold in order to give children access to support. The increase was not concentrated in historically underdiagnosed groups, which is what a genuine catch-up would look like; it was larger among boys, metropolitan children and children from non-diverse backgrounds, with no change in age at diagnosis.

Other researchers read the same period differently, pointing to comparable prevalence in the United Kingdom and United States and to Australian data collected before the scheme, and argue the increase reflects better identification of more subtle presentations.

Both readings support the same conclusion about the system. A diagnosis has become the price of admission to support. That is bad for children who need help and do not meet a threshold, bad for the integrity of the diagnosis itself, and bad for a scheme whose costs were built on different assumptions. The Thriving Kids program, beginning in the second half of 2026 and redirecting children with lower support needs away from the scheme by mid-2027, changes the gateway again.

The party's position is that support should follow need rather than a label, and that no parent should be advised that the way to obtain help for their child is to obtain a diagnosis for them.

15. What is not measured

• Early-onset cancer. Diagnoses are rising among people in their 30s and 40s and there is no national program investigating why.
• Cumulative chemical exposure. Each chemical is assessed individually. Nobody measures the combined load an Australian carries.
• Most PFAS compounds. Guideline values exist for five of more than 4,000. The compound with the highest detections in Sydney has none.
• Water outside the major utilities. Routine PFAS testing is limited beyond metropolitan supplies, and a single clear result has been treated as grounds not to keep looking.
• The contents of supplements. Around 10,000 products, no pre-market evaluation, several hundred reviewed a year.
• Sunscreen performance. Self-certified, not tested before listing, in the country with the world's highest skin cancer rate.
• Food composition and origin. Established by a journalist's laboratory bill rather than a monitoring program.
• Cumulative and combined exposure. Every chemical is assessed alone. No agency measures the total load an Australian carries, or what these compounds do in combination.
• Total fluoride intake. Water, toothpaste, dental treatments, food and tea are regulated separately and consumed together. The combined figure is not held.
• Household product composition. Cleaning, pest, cosmetic and personal care products carry no requirement to disclose full composition to the purchaser.
• Cumulative imaging dose. Australia has no national dose registry and no diagnostic reference levels equivalent to those in comparable countries. No patient is told their lifetime dose.
• Early-onset bowel cancer. The highest rate in the world, rising up to 8 per cent a year, three to four times higher for those born in the 1980s than the 1950s, and no national program investigating the cause.
• The interaction of any of it. Diet, chemical exposure, water contamination and disadvantage are studied separately and experienced together.

Every one of those is a decision, and every one is cheap to reverse relative to the cost of the diseases in section 2.

16. What has been offered

The common feature is that every existing measure is a strategy or a review inside an agency that already exists, aimed at one input at a time, on the timeframe of the agency that runs it. Paraquat has been under review since 1997.

17. What this memo does not do

It does not give clinical advice, and nothing in it is a reason to stop taking a medicine, a supplement, or to stop using sunscreen. Sunscreen that underperforms its label still protects; the failure is in the labelling and in the regulation of it.

It does not claim that any Australian is being deliberately poisoned. It claims that the food, water and product supply is the largest single driver of disease in the country and that nobody is required to tell an Australian what is in it. Negligence at scale does not require anyone to have intended it.

It does not blame farmers for the chemicals they are sold, or blame individuals for a diet supplied to them.

It does not claim autism is a disease, and it does not suggest an environmental cause for it.

18. The second emergency

Declare it, as the first one is declared.

The first emergency covers the deaths of despair. This one covers everything that enters an Australian body. Together they are the same argument: the largest causes of death and disability in this country are distributed across portfolios in a way that means nobody answers for them.

One authority for everything consumed. The testing and disclosure functions of the Therapeutic Goods Administration, Food Standards Australia New Zealand, the pesticides authority, the industrial chemicals scheme and the National Residue Survey are consolidated into a single national testing and disclosure authority, inside the Care department, answerable for one question: what is going into Australians. This consolidates regulators rather than adding one, consistent with the reduction of twenty-two departments to seven.

Test everything, and publish it. Routine testing of food, water, supplements, medicines, sunscreen and consumer products, by batch and by product, with results published live through the Digital Australia Authority. Every public water supply tested and published, not only metropolitan utilities. Testing extended beyond the handful of PFAS compounds that currently have guideline values.

Disclose the composition of everything. Every agricultural chemical applied to a crop, every additive in every food and drink, every ingredient in every supplement and product — named, quantified, and published in a searchable public register as a condition of sale. Undisclosed means unsellable. This is the same rule the party applies to tobacco and to agricultural produce, extended to everything consumed.

Nothing is grandfathered. Every chemical, additive, product and pharmaceutical on the Australian market holds a current approval, tested against present-day standards and present-day detection limits, or it is withdrawn. Approvals expire on a fixed cycle and renewal requires fresh evidence. The burden of demonstrating safety sits with the seller, not with the public. Paraquat entered the market in 1961 and has been under review since 1997; glyphosate's Australian position rests on an assessment completed in 2016. Neither is a current approval.

Measure cumulative exposure for the first time. Total chemical load per person, combination effects, total fluoride intake, and cumulative lifetime imaging dose. None of these has ever been measured in Australia. This is not re-testing; it is testing that has not been done.

Benchmark against the world. Any chemical banned in the European Union or the United Kingdom must be justified in public against that decision or withdrawn. The pesticides authority is reformed so that a thirty-year review is impossible, with statutory decision deadlines and a deemed outcome. Transition funding accompanies every withdrawal so the cost does not fall on farmers.

Register the dose. A national diagnostic imaging dose registry, diagnostic reference levels covering CT, PET/CT and SPECT/CT as comparable countries maintain, cumulative per-patient dose recorded and available to the patient, and auditing of referral justification. The object is to remove unjustified examinations, not to reduce necessary ones.

Investigate what is making us sick. A standing national inquiry with terms of reference the evidence already supports: early-onset bowel cancer and the generational pattern behind it, the composition of the food supply, cumulative chemical exposure, water contamination, and the interaction of all of them with the social gradient in section 6.

Run the campaign. Australia has done this twice and both times it worked: coronary heart disease mortality down nearly 90 per cent, melanoma mortality down a third since 2013. Sustained public education on diet, activity and prevention, funded at the scale of the disease burden rather than the scale of the residual budget.

And make it an asset. More than 70 per cent of Australian produce is exported. The cleanest food supply in the world is a premium Australia can charge for, in the markets that are already closing to the chemicals we still permit.

19. Summary

Australians die old of dementia and heart failure and young of despair and heart disease. Around 53,545 will die of cancer this year, roughly three deaths in ten. Overweight and obesity is the leading risk factor contributing to ill health and death, two in three adults are living with it, and the adult figure is still rising.

Cancer is being diagnosed more often in people in their 30s and 40s and no national program is investigating why. Australia has the world's highest rate of early-onset bowel cancer, rising up to 8 per cent a year, with incidence three to four times higher among Australians born in the 1980s than the 1950s. The researchers state the cause is unknown and that early-life exposures need to be identified.

Underneath those numbers is a supply chain the state does not inspect. Sixty per cent of the country's highest-volume pesticides are banned in Europe. Seventy-three thousand people were found to have been drinking water above the safety limit the moment the limit was corrected, and the compound with the highest detections in Sydney has no limit at all.

Sixteen of twenty sunscreens failed their labels in the country with the world's highest skin cancer rate. Around 10,000 supplements are sold without pre-market evaluation. Undeclared ingredients were found in ordinary supermarket food, by a journalist.

Eight national agencies and eight state regimes check parts of this. None owns it. In every recent case the problem was found by a consumer group, a journalist or a customer, and the regulator arrived afterwards.

Sovereign Australia declares the second emergency: one authority responsible for everything that enters an Australian body, everything tested, everything disclosed, every chemical benchmarked against the countries that have already banned it, and a national inquiry into what is making us sick. Coronary heart disease mortality fell by nearly ninety per cent because a country decided to reduce it. This is the same decision about a different set of diseases.

20. Sources

1. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Causes of Death, Australia, 2024 (released 14 November 2025), and the accompanying media release — 187,268 deaths registered; dementia the leading cause at 17,549 deaths and 9.4 per cent of the total, overtaking ischaemic heart disease at 16,275 and 8.7 per cent; chronic lower respiratory disease third for the first time since 1996, ahead of cerebrovascular disease and lung cancer, with approximately 100 deaths separating third from fifth; COVID-19 twelfth and suicide sixteenth; dementia deaths up 39 per cent in a decade and more than 160 per cent since 2006; coronary heart disease mortality down nearly 90 per cent since its 1968 peak to 43.4 per 100,000; 68.2 per cent of deaths people aged over 75; the leading causes of death for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people; sections 1, 2, 5 and 6.
2. Informed Decisions analysis of ABS Causes of Death 2024 — total years of potential life lost of 1,009,187 in 2024, and the finding that measured by years of potential life lost suicide is the leading cause of premature death; section 2.
3. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Overweight and obesity (updated June 2026), drawing on the ABS National Health Measurement Survey 2022–24 — overweight or obesity in 67 per cent of adults and 27 per cent of children aged 2–17; obesity rising from 31 to 33 per cent and abdominal obesity from 41 to 48 per cent; 8.5 per cent of children living with obesity; adults at 56 per cent in 1995; overweight including obesity as the leading risk factor contributing to ill health and death in 2024; the socioeconomic and remoteness gradients; First Nations prevalence of 74 per cent for adults and 38 per cent for children; Australia ranked 10th in the OECD; the 2030 childhood target and the assessment that it is not on track; sections 1, 4 and 6.
4. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Cancer data in Australia (2026 update), and Cancer Australia statistics — an estimated 53,545 cancer deaths and 170,000 new cases in 2025; around 3 in 10 deaths due to cancer; close to one million Australians diagnosed in the past decade; age-standardised mortality falling from 257 to an estimated 194 per 100,000 between 2000 and 2025; five-year relative survival rising from 50 to 72 per cent; incidence rising from 476 per 100,000 in 1982 to 609 in 2021; the finding that cancer is becoming more commonly diagnosed in people in their 30s and 40s; melanoma incidence rising from 54 to 63 per 100,000 while mortality fell from 8.0 in 2013 to an estimated 5.3 in 2025; prostate mortality from 63 to 33 and breast from 38 to 22 per 100,000; sections 1, 2 and 3.
5. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Dementia in Australia (2025) and Australian Burden of Disease Study 2024 — 425,000 Australians living with dementia in 2024 and a projection exceeding one million by 2065; dementia the leading cause of death for women since 2016 with 62.4 per cent of dementia deaths female; approximately 262,000 DALY and 4.5 per cent of total disease burden; the leading cause of burden for those aged 80 and over; coronary heart disease as the leading cause of total burden and of death for men at 10,153 deaths and in outer regional, remote and very remote Australia; and the caution that part of the measured dementia increase reflects changes in coding practice; sections 1 and 5.
6. Adele Ferguson, Four Corners, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (part one broadcast 27 July 2026) — an eight-month investigation with forensic food scientists commissioning laboratory testing of everyday supermarket products, raising questions about food authenticity, misleading origin claims and undeclared ingredients in common pantry items; part two examining international supply chains; section 7.
7. Taiwan Food and Drug Administration statements and Taiwanese reporting (July 2026) — benzo[a]pyrene contamination of Central Union Oil Corp cooking oil at four times the legal limit of 2 parts per billion, the same limit applied in the European Union; approximately 1,300 tonnes distributed to 360 downstream businesses across 30 batches; recall expanded to 401 products affecting more than 13,000 businesses across all 22 counties and municipalities; detection by a downstream customer in May, notification of the producer on 11 June and of authorities on 30 June; a fine of NT$165.2 million for failure to report; detention of executives; and Executive Yuan approval on 23 July 2026 of amendments covering source management, process controls, abnormality reporting and digital governance; section 7.
8. National Health and Medical Research Council, Review of PFAS in Australian drinking water and the updated Australian Drinking Water Guidelines (June 2025), with Friends of the Earth analysis and NSW Government and Sydney Water statements — PFOS reduced from 70 to 8 nanograms per litre, PFOA from 560 to 200, PFHxS set at 30 and PFBS at 1,000, with no value derivable for GenX chemicals; approximately 73,000 Australians exposed above the 2025 guideline levels, including 41,000 in the Blue Mountains, 10,000 in Ayr, 10,000 in Katherine, 5,500 in Narrabri and 3,330 in Bundaberg; Blue Mountains contamination from legacy firefighting foam undetected until 2024; PFBA returning the highest detections in the Sydney region with no Australian guideline; PFAS as a class of more than 4,000 manufactured chemicals; and the limited extent of routine testing outside metropolitan utilities; sections 1, 8 and 15.
9. CHOICE, We tested the SPF claims of 20 sunscreens (June 2025 and subsequent updates), and Therapeutic Goods Administration, Sunscreen SPF testing — information for consumers — 16 of 20 sunscreens failing their labelled SPF, with the lowest result at approximately SPF4 and confirmed at a second laboratory; the TGA's February 2025 statement of confidence in listed sunscreens; its September 2025 concerns regarding 20 products; the December 2025 recall of Cancer Council Clear Zinc Kids SPF50+; the subsequent withdrawal of further brands following identification of significant concerns regarding a base formulation supplied by Wild Child Laboratories and assessed as unlikely to exceed SPF21; and the manufacturer responses disputing the findings; sections 1, 9 and 13.
10. Australian National Audit Office, Therapeutic Goods Regulation: Complementary Medicines, and Therapeutic Goods Administration guidance on listed medicines — approximately 10,000 complementary medicines on the market and two-thirds of Australians using them; listed medicines comprising about 98 per cent of the category and not subject to pre-market evaluation of efficacy, product or label; several hundred post-market reviews annually; the finding that as many as 90 per cent of reviewed products were non-compliant, with 20 of 31 randomly selected medicines recording labelling issues, 22 manufacturing or quality issues and 14 inadequate evidence for claims; TGA findings on imported melatonin supplements containing amounts significantly higher or lower than labelled and the removal of four vitamin D products for insufficient evidence; sections 1, 9 and 13.
11. Griffith University School of Environment and Science, published in Environmental Science & Technology and reported March 2026 — analysis of 45 pesticide products used in volumes exceeding 100 tonnes a year, finding 60 per cent banned in the European Union, 24 per cent approved in Europe but banned in at least one other country and 16 per cent retaining full international approval; the observation that global chemical companies have been slow to register newer alternatives in Australia, leaving producers dependent on legacy pesticides; and that more than 70 per cent of Australia's primary produce is exported, such that continued use may complicate trade; sections 1, 10 and 18.
12. Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, paraquat and diquat review decision (23 June 2026), with responses from Parkinson's Australia, Pesticide Action Australia, the National Farmers' Federation and Grain Producers Australia — paraquat banned in more than 70 countries including the European Union, United Kingdom and China; under Australian review since 1997; the decision to permit continued use with maximum application rates reduced from 1,150 to 231 grams per hectare, backpack spraying phased out and enclosed mixing and loading required; the finding that the weight of evidence does not show approved use increases the risk of Parkinson's disease; the submission signed by more than forty Australian neurologists and movement disorder specialists; and calls for transition funding for farmers; section 10.
13. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Autism in Australia, 2022 (released 11 October 2024); Whitehouse and others, published research reported March and April 2026; Australian National University Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Understanding autism prevalence; and OECD, Policy Responses to Rising Autism Diagnoses in Childhood (2026) — 290,900 autistic Australians in 2022, 1.1 per cent of the population and an increase of 41.8 per cent from 2018; 4.3 per cent of children aged 5–14; more than one in 25 children aged 7–14 diagnosed; NDIS participants with autism rising from 34 per cent in 2022 to 40 per cent in 2025; the estimate that the NDIS caused an approximately 32 per cent increase in measured prevalence through a lowered diagnostic threshold rather than catch-up in underdiagnosed groups; the contrary reading that increases reflect improved identification, with comparable international prevalence; and the Thriving Kids program commencing in the second half of 2026; section 12.
14. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, National Preventive Health Strategy 2021–2030 and the National Obesity Strategy 2022–2032; Australian Greens chemical and food labelling policy; and party statements at the 2025 federal election — the 5 per cent childhood overweight and obesity reduction target by 2030 and its current status; section 16.
15. Meyers AL, Dowty JG, Mahmood K, Macrae FA, Rosty C, Buchanan DD and Jenkins MA, Age-specific trends in colorectal, appendiceal, and anal tumour incidence by histological subtype in Australia from 1990 to 2020 (University of Melbourne, medRxiv 2025); Cancer Australia, Early-onset cancer statistics; Bowel Cancer Australia; and research published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (May 2026) — Australia holding the world's highest early-onset bowel cancer rate; incidence among under-50s rising up to 8 per cent a year while stabilising or declining among over-50s; colorectal cancer as the deadliest cancer for Australians aged 25 to 44 in 2025; the rate among 20 to 29 year olds rising from 2.2 to an estimated 4.6 per 100,000 between 2000 and 2025; a 266 per cent increase among 15 to 24 year olds over three decades; one in eight diagnoses occurring under 50; 28,265 early-onset cases from 1990 to 2020 with an estimated 4,347 attributable to the rise; early-onset incidence rising 5 to 9 per cent annually producing 5,341 excess cases distributed 45 per cent colon, 36 per cent rectum, 12 per cent appendix and 7 per cent anus; incidence three to four times higher among those born in the 1980s than the 1950s; the projection of a doubling approximately every 20 years across four countries, with a decade trend of 3.7 per cent a year overall and 7 per cent among those aged 20 to 39; the statement that the cause is unknown and that generational shifts suggest evolving risk factor profiles and early-life exposures; the lowering of the screening age to 45 from July 2024 and participation of 41.7 per cent; sections 3 and 15.
16. National Toxicology Program, NTP Monograph on the State of the Science Concerning Fluoride Exposure and Neurodevelopment and Cognition (August 2024); Taylor KW and others, Fluoride exposure and children's IQ scores: a systematic review and meta-analysis, JAMA Pediatrics (6 January 2025); the authors' response in Annals of Global Health (December 2025); commentary in STAT and the American Dental Association statement of 6 January 2025 — the conclusion at moderate confidence that fluoride exposure above 1.5 milligrams per litre is associated with lower IQ in children; the synthesis of 74 studies from 1989 to 2023 and the inverse association reported; the statement that data were insufficient to determine the effect at the level recommended for community water supplies and that no adverse effect on adult cognition was found; the assessment of total fluoride exposure from all sources rather than fluoridated water alone; the acknowledged risk of bias in included studies, the criticism by an independent National Academies committee, the conflicting 2021 and 2023 meta-analyses, the opposing editorials, and the dental profession's position that practice should not change; section 8.
17. Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, Glyphosate and Final regulatory position: consideration of the evidence for a formal reconsideration of glyphosate (2016), and The IARC assessment explained; International Agency for Research on Cancer, Monograph 112 (March 2015); and reported litigation and Canadian Federal Court proceedings — glyphosate first registered in Australia in the 1970s as Roundup; 80 active constituent approvals and 471 registered products as at February 2016, of which 130 were for home garden use; the Group 2A classification alongside malathion and diazinon; the Australian conclusion that glyphosate does not pose a carcinogenic risk and that formal reconsideration was not required, on the basis that the international classification is a hazard rather than a risk assessment; approximately 181,000 claims pending in the United States; and the February 2025 ruling of Canada's Federal Court that Health Canada's 2022 approval of a glyphosate-based product was unreasonable; sections 10 and 11.
18. Australian Industrial Chemicals Introduction Scheme and Food Standards Australia New Zealand labelling requirements — the regulation of industrial chemicals at the point of introduction, and the absence of a requirement equivalent to mandatory food ingredient labelling for household cleaning, pest control, cosmetic and personal care products; section 11.
19. Smith-Bindman R and others, Projected lifetime cancer risks from current computed tomography imaging, JAMA Internal Medicine (2025); the Radiation-Induced Cancer study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine (2025); Cancer Risk Associated With Radiological Examinations: 2025 Updates; International Atomic Energy Agency guidance on radiation protection during PET/CT; and the Japanese national diagnostic reference levels for nuclear medicine (2025) — approximately 103,000 future cancers projected from computed tomography examinations performed in the United States in 2023; 3.7 million children followed for an average of 10.1 years demonstrating a dose-response relationship, with measurably increased risk at a bone marrow dose of 15 to 30 milligray equivalent to one or two head CT scans; computed tomography as about 10 per cent of examinations and more than 60 per cent of collective dose; nearly a quarter of CT referrals in a seven-country European audit not meeting evidence-based guidelines; 25 to 30 per cent of paediatric CT scans for minor head injury assessed as unnecessary; effective doses of about 7 millisieverts for whole-body PET/CT with low-dose CT and up to 30 millisieverts with diagnostic CT; published dosimetry of about 21 millisieverts for prostate cancer tracers; and Japan's establishment and periodic revision of national diagnostic reference levels including for hybrid CT; sections 12 and 15.
20. Sovereign Australia, Tobacco and Vapes (Memo 17), Farmers 1st, The People's Portal and Everything Visible (Memo 18) — the disclosure and public register principle applied to tobacco and agricultural produce and extended here to everything consumed; the Digital Australia Authority publication model; and the reduction of twenty-two departments to seven; sections 15 and 18.
21. Sovereign Australia, The Quiet Emergency (Memo 14) — the first emergency, the deaths of despair, and the finding that no portfolio holds responsibility for them; sections 2, 6 and 18.