The Australian Senate has finally approved an inquiry into the country’s alarming excess deaths that started post-COVID but aren’t all attributable to the virus.

The United Australia Party’s Senator Ralph Babet, who proposed the motion to look into the matter, celebrated the narrowly successful 31-30 vote on social media.

“It’s taken me two years to get this done. The senate will now investigate why so many people are dying. Why excess deaths are up,” he posted, attaching a video of the senate proceedings. 

Babet had previously proposed three unsuccessful motions attempting to look into the spike in excess deaths that started shortly after COVID, as well as the COVID vaccine rollout.

Australia’s excess deaths

Excess deaths refers to the number of deaths in a specific region being more than expected given historical trends and demographics.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows excess deaths started in 2021, peaked in 2022 and persisted through 2023 — still 9.9% higher than expected —  as reported by independent journalist Rebekah Barnett’s Dystopian Down Under substack. 

One analysis by Actuaries Digital found that half of the over 20,000 excess deaths in 2022 were attributable to COVID. This report found that COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death that year, behind ischaemic heart disease and dementia.

“The much higher than predicted number of deaths from ischaemic heart disease has meant that it has retained its position as the leading cause of death, despite continued growth in the number of deaths from dementia,” the report reads.

The report further concluded that COVID vaccinated was “highly unlikely” to have contributed to excess deaths, stating that “given the well-documented reduction in COVID-19 mortality risk conferred by vaccination, the 14 vaccine-caused deaths that had occurred by March 2023 are a fraction of the lives saved by vaccination.”