Child vaccination rates are falling fast, with some regions barely reaching 80%
- Written by Peter Breadon, Program Director, Health and Aged Care, Grattan Institute
Child vaccination has been one of Australia’s biggest success stories. Before the COVID pandemic, we hit the national target of 95% of one-year-olds fully vaccinated. Our child vaccination rates were among the best in the world.
Vaccination protects children from potentially severe illnesses such as measles, mumps and whooping cough. These diseases can cause severe pain, put children in hospital, risk their lives and leave them with ongoing health problems.
But Australia’s vaccine success is quickly slipping away. After the pandemic, the share of one-year-olds who are fully vaccinated kept falling. In some areas, it’s now barely 80%.
The risks are real. Whooping cough notifications are the highest since records began, 35 years ago. In the past week, there have been measles exposure sites in Sydney and regional New South Wales, including hospitals and a high-school hall.
We don’t want to end up like other countries. In America, dozens of people have been hospitalised with measles already this year, and Canada has lost its measles elimination status. An outbreak in London is putting children in hospital, and may force unvaccinated children to stay home from school.
Why aim high?
One-year-old fully immunised babies have received vaccinations for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) and pneumococcal disease.
High vaccination coverage is necessary to achieve herd immunity: the point where diseases find it hard to spread to children who aren’t vaccinated. Some children aren’t vaccinated because they are too young. Others can’t be vaccinated because they have weakened immune systems.
When 95% of children are vaccinated, it’s difficult for even highly infectious diseases such as measles to spread in the community, protecting both the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
Read more: What is herd immunity and how many people need to be vaccinated to protect a community?
Sliding backwards
Grattan Institute analysis shows that over the past five years, Australia has recorded an unprecedented slide in the proportion of one-year-olds who are fully vaccinated. In the year to 30 September 2025, 92% of one-year-olds were fully vaccinated, compared with 95% in 2020.
Many parts of Australia are now well below national vaccination targets. Five years ago, 56% of regions and suburbs were achieving the national target for one-year old vaccination. Today it is just 18%.
Some areas are falling further behind
The declines have been biggest where children were already more vulnerable.
In the 10% of areas with the highest vaccination for one-year olds, uptake slid by just 1.3 percentage points since 2020 – from an average of 98% in 2020 to 97% in 2025.
But in the areas with the lowest vaccination, the fall was more than four times greater, at 5.7 percentage points – from an average of 90% in 2020 to 84% in 2025.
Almost no area has recorded a vaccination increase. And every state has areas with sharp falls.
Some of the biggest surges in the share of one-year olds who are fully vaccinated are in:
- Bankstown, Sydney, from 92.2% to 84.8%
- Keilor, Melbourne, from 95.8% to 88.8%
- Gascoyne, Western Australia, from 95.6% to 76.9%
- Nerang, Queensland, from 94.1% to 82.2%
- Barkly, Northern Territory, from 96.2% to 87.0%
- Meander Valley and West Tamar, Tasmania, from 92.6% to 83.5%.
Notes: SA3s are geographical areas typically covering a population of between 30,000 and 130,000 people. Only SA3s in which data was available for both 2020 and 2025 are displayed. Data are for the four quarters to 30 September in each year, rather than the calendar year.
Grattan Institute analysis of Department of Health, Disability, and Ageing (2026)
There is no single profile for communities with dangerously low vaccination. They are in cities and rural areas, in wealthy and poorer areas, and in every capital city.
Note: SA3s are geographical areas typically covering a population of between 30,000 and 130,000 people. Remoteness classification uses the Modified Monash Model. Each SA3 has been assigned to the MMM category in which the majority of its population live. Average vaccination rate is the population-weighted mean vaccination rate for SA3s within the MMM category. Data are for the four quarters to 30 September 2025, rather than the calendar year.
Grattan Institute analysis of Department of Health, Disability, and Ageing (2026), Department of Health and Aged Care (2023), and ABS (2025)
Why the decline?
It has become much harder to get children vaccinated, and it’s not down to a single factor.
Instead, a major survey suggests a mix of psychological barriers to acceptance and practical barriers to access.
Misinformation and the intense debate around COVID vaccines has likely eroded trust in childhood vaccination. Among parents with unvaccinated children, almost half don’t think vaccines are safe.
But practical barriers matter too. One in four parents whose children are only partially vaccinated say it’s difficult to get an appointment when their child’s vaccination is due.
Governments have a plan – now they need to act
Australia’s federal and state governments must tackle both types of problem.
They agree. They are gearing up to respond to this emerging public health crisis with a new national vaccination strategy, agreed last year. It sets the right directions by emphasising building trust in vaccines, strengthening the immunisation workforce, using data to target effort and increasing accountability for getting results.
But the true test will be federal and state government budgets released in coming months. Those budgets must make new investments that turn the strategy into decisive action.
The investments should span the full gamut of the strategy, including:
public advertising
combating misinformation by better understanding community beliefs, tailoring government information and advertising, and helping health workers engage effectively with sceptical patients
modernising data systems to track trends and focus effort
delivering vaccination more often in more places, such as workplaces, community centres, and homes.
Crucially, tougher targets are needed to stop some communities falling behind, and funding for local efforts, tailored to local needs, to help them catch up.
Australia has hit ambitious vaccination targets before. Getting back to pre-pandemic levels will be harder than achieving them the first time, so governments must step up and redouble their efforts to protect Australia’s children.
Authors: Peter Breadon, Program Director, Health and Aged Care, Grattan Institute
Hashtag.net.au
