Is Australia a safe travel destination?

According to a new report published last week in the Journal of Travel Medicine, Australia is a safe destination for overseas visitors – at least in terms of tourist fatalities by other than natural causes.

In the period 2001-2003 there were 1,068 overseas visitor deaths recorded by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The majority of these deaths were from natural causes (73 percent), particularly ischemic heart diseases. There were a total of 247 accidental deaths, with the main causes being transportation accidents and drowning.

In the three-year study period, there were only eight homicides recorded for the whole country. This rate is very low compared to other nations, and especially compared to many individual tourist destinations. As noted by Venditto and Mouzos from their 2006 investigation of visitor deaths for the Australian Institute of Criminology, it can be said with reasonable conviction that the murder of overseas visitors in Australia is a statistically rare event. Between 1994 and 2003 the murder rate of tourists was 0.9 per million short-term visitors to Australia.

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