How serious a threat is terrorism to Australians? We devote billions of taxpayer dollars to it, impose economic costs on ourselves and our industries and sacrifice some of our most basic freedoms for it. So it must be a huge threat to Australia, correct?
Since the 1978 Hilton Hotel bombing in Sydney, there have been 113 Australian victims of terrorism. That includes Australians killed overseas in terrorist attacks as well as non-Australians killed here, such as the Turkish consul-general murdered in Sydney in 1980.
For the purposes of comparison, we’re going to cheat a little and only look at more recent data on what kills Australians from the last 10 years, from 2003-12, using the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Cause of Death data.


Crikey is committed to hosting lively discussions. Help us keep the conversation useful, interesting and welcoming. We aim to publish comments quickly in the interest of promoting robust conversation, but we’re a small team and we deploy filters to protect against legal risk. Occasionally your comment may be held up while we review, but we’re working as fast as we can to keep the conversation rolling.
The Crikey comment section is members-only content. Please subscribe to leave a comment.
The Crikey comment section is members-only content. Please login to leave a comment.