(Note: The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released updated information. The link above will take you to that new information. The table used in the comparisons above is located immediately below.)
 

The Cancer rate of 32.90% compares with 27.8% and the suicide rate of 15.70% compares with 1.8% (eight times higher!). The suicide rate of 15.70% compares with 7.21% from the "Mortality Study". Twice as high?

From DVA web site:
Data quality and limitations
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Cause-of-death information depends on the information provided by the certifying clinician on the death certificate. Until 1997, only a single underlying cause of death had been used to report cause of death on the NDI, despite other related causes of death being recorded on the death certificate (multiple causes of death). The effect of this may be that some causes of death reported in the Morbidity Study by veterans may not be reflected in the cause-of-death data. This leads to an underestimation of the numbers of deaths allocated to a particular cause. The underestimation is somewhat offset by the breadth of the categories used in the Morbidity Study which tends to aggregate a range of deaths, e.g. all cardiovascular-related causes of death are included in the illness category. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest an under-reporting of suicide and other causes of death (e.g. accidental drug overdose, HIV/AIDS) due to the social stigma and financial implications surrounding such a finding.

 

9.4 LEADING CAUSES OF DEATH - 1998
Causes of death	Males no.	Females no.	Persons no.	Proportion of total deaths %
All causes	67,073	60,129	127,202	100.0
Malignant neoplasms (cancer)	19,279	15,037	34,316	26.5
Malignant neoplasms of trachea, bronchus and lung	4,821	2,053	6,874	5.4
Ischaemic heart disease	15,024	12,801	27,825	21.9
Cerebrovascular disease (stroke)	4,812	7,170	11,982	9.4
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and allied conditions	3,628	2,486	6,114	4.8
Pneumonia and influenza	2,049	2,530	4,579	3.6
Accidents	3,168	1,652	4,820	3.8
Motor vehicle traffic accidents	1,224	507	1,731	1.4
Diseases of arteries, arterioles and capillaries	1,415	1,330	2,745	2.2
Diabetes mellitus	1,424	1,327	2,751	2.2
Suicide	2,150	533	2,683	2.1
Hereditary and degenerative diseases of the central nervous system	947	1,085	2,032	1.6
All other causes	12,866	14,245	27,111	21.3
Source: Causes of Death, Australia, 1998 (3303.0).