(Note: This isn't the best statistic, but because we don't have the age breakdown of debt recipients we can't get the exact rate of death for 45 and below) 4/
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If we look at the last 10 years (2008-2018), we see that the average number of deaths in Australia in this age group was 6,607 The population >15 years was ~19.5 million 5/
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Plugging those numbers in we get 6607/19500000 = 0.0007 = 0.07% So the VERY CRUDE rate of death in the sample of robodebt recipients was about 0.1/0.07 = 40% higher than the national average 6/
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(This is what's known as a relative risk, which means the risk of one thing happening compared to another) 6.5/
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What does this mean? Well, not that much. As I said, this is very crude. We know that the debt notices were probably sent to less healthy than average people (some of them were disability recipients, for example) 7/
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So the fact that the relative risk of death was about 40% higher in the robodebt recipients may not mean anything at all (although it's worth noting that we HAVE - mostly - controlled for age by definition here) 8/
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Replying to @jpwarren
I'm not saying the policy was good, just that the figures don't demonstrate a massive death toll and are hard to interpret without much more in-depth analysis
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Yes I think that's a fair summation. It's an awful thing to do regardless, but I'm not convinced it causes death, and the 776 figure has been unfortunately over-hyped
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