Australia is about to strike a cemetery shortage

Australia is about to strike an uncomfortable cemetery problem.

They’re running out of space in their current form.

And with the overall death rate rising and set to peak in the next few years, there’ll be more people needing to be buried than ever before.

One way to solve the issue is to re-use existing graves.

“Most Australian states, bar a few, have something called in perpetuity of internment, which means once there is a body in the ground that grave can never be reused for any other purpose,” Hannah Gould, Research Fellow in Social And Political Sciences at Melbourne University, explained on 3AW Afternoons.

“Most European cemeteries, however, they have a limited tenure, which means that after a couple of years, once the body has fully decomposed, that body can be reused for a grave.

“Some places closer to us, like Singapore, have a very, very short tenure, five or 10 years.”

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