07/05/2026
Tomorrow, South Australia Health and Wellbeing Minister Blair Boyer will take the proposal for every state and territory to make organ and tissue donor registration available through driver’s licences to this week’s Health Ministers’ Meeting. This is an example of the articles that have been published in the last few days. https://glamadelaide.com.au/sa-leads-national-push-to-add-organ-donor-registration-to-drivers-licences/
While we at ShareLife support this proposal, we hope that the Ministers will try to gain a deeper understanding of the effect of registration for organ donation on the consent rate for organ donation.
The Australian community are told that, "A huge 74 per cent of South Australians are registered donors, compared with the national average of just 35 per cent." So how can the consent rate in South Australia in 2025 be 54%, only one percent higher than the national rate of 53%? How is it possible that 74% of the population are registered and their consent rate is only 54%? What is happening in the hospitals for this to happen? Journalists and politicians repeat these figures without giving any thought as to the accuracy. OTA continues to mislead the community by blaming the low consent rate solely on the Australian community rather taking ownership of the problem.
We are told that, "four in five Australians support organ donation while only about one in three are officially registered on the Australian Organ Donor Register." So how can this be true when the national consent rate was only 53% in 2025? Only 53% say yes when requested to donate a loved one’s organs but 80% of the community support organ donation? What is going on in the hospitals that the consent rate is so much lower than the rate of support in the community for organ donation?
Will the Health Ministers be told that there has been a dramatic decline in the consent rate in South Australia from 74% to 54% since 2019 despite a big increase in the percent of the total population registered from 55% to 61% over the same period.
Surely ShareLife cannot be the only ones to analyse the discrepancy between registration for organ donation and consent for organ donation. It is extremely concerning that in South Australia the registration rate has increased from 55.2% in 2019 to 61% in 2025 while the consent rate has declined from 74% to 54%. I hope Health and Wellbeing Minister Blair Boyer will be honest enough to provide this analysis when he takes the proposal to this week’s Health Ministers’ Meeting to make organ and tissue donor registration available through driver’s licences.
The national data presents a similar discrepancy, though the changes are smaller. Nationally, the registration rate has increased from 26.7%% in 2018 to 28.8% in 2025 while the consent rate has declined from 64% to 53%. I wonder whether the Health Ministers will be made aware of the facts.
