Dementia now causes more than 1 in 10 Australian deaths
Thank you for standing with Hem’s Law. A lot has happened in the past few weeks, and I want to share it with you, because the case for change has never been clearer.
The scale keeps growing
On 27 October, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released its latest Causes of Death data. Dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, remains Australia’s leading cause of death. In 2025 it took 19,019 lives, more than 1 in every 10 deaths in the country.
This is the first time dementia has crossed that line. Its share of all deaths has almost doubled since 2006, when it ranked fourth. Dementia deaths rose by 37% between 2016 and 2025, and its lead over heart disease, now the second leading cause, keeps widening.
Those figures only count deaths where dementia was recorded as the underlying cause. Many more Australians die with dementia contributing to their death - in 2024 that figure was 33,700.
As our population ages, more and more families will sit beside someone they love as dementia reaches its final stage, where many will die from cachexia and dehydration, slowly wasting away over days, sometimes weeks. This campaign estimates that between 9,000 and 13,000 Australians die this way every year.
What I heard at VADCON
I recently attended VADCON, the National Voluntary Assisted Dying Conference. Across the conference, one problem was raised more times than I could count: the catch-22 that shuts people with dementia out of VAD. To access VAD, a person must have decision-making capacity at every step. In every state and territory except the ACT, they must also have no more than 12 months to live. Dementia takes away capacity long before it brings death close. By the time a person with dementia meets one requirement, they have already lost the other.
The real barrier
In his recent National Press Club address, Andrew Denton of Go Gentle Australia called extending VAD to dementia “the hardest conversation of all.” He was honest about why: “asking a doctor to end the life of someone who can’t look them in the eye and say, yes, this is what I want, is enormous.”
He pointed to the Netherlands and Canada, where the law does allow assisted dying for some people with dementia, but where, in his words, the take-up has been tiny. Even where the law permits it, the barrier is whether a clinician is willing to end the life of a person who can no longer confirm that this is what they want. Go Gentle’s new research fund is starting right there, with a study of how VAD practitioners see access for people with dementia.
That is exactly the gap Hem’s Law can close.
VAD is a person’s own decision to end their life before their illness does. It is a decision about the quality of life. Hem’s Law applies at a different point: only once swallowing has permanently failed, life-sustaining treatment has been withdrawn or is no longer appropriate, and two independent practitioners have certified that death is imminent and irreversible. At that point, no one is deciding whether this person will die. The disease has already settled that. The only decision left is how long the dying takes, and what the person endures along the way.
That is a decision about the quality of death.
No doctor is asked to look someone in the eye and ask whether they want to die. The question in front of the family and the clinician is a different one. Must this death be prolonged when suffering cannot be reliably relieved?
Two parallel lines
At VADCON, Dr Sivaraj Rajadorai described VAD and palliative care as two parallel train lines. That image stayed with me. I see Hem’s Law as a final section at the very end of the palliative care line, for the people that line leads into suffering, who were never offered the chance to board the VAD line.
Hem’s Law takes nothing from either. It sits alongside both, for the narrow point at the end of dementia where VAD cannot reach and palliative care cannot promise comfort.
Why this cannot wait
The work on extending VAD to dementia matters, and it will take years to get right. But people are dying of cachexia and dehydration this week, in homes, hospitals and aged care across the country, with their families beside them. A narrowly drawn reform for the point where death is already imminent and irreversible doesn’t need to wait for that work to finish. It can move now, alongside it.
If you have sat beside someone with dementia, please share this petition with one person who has too. Every signature tells our parliaments that Australians are ready for this conversation.
Thank you for being part of it.
Angie
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