New Zealanders worth much more than Australians

Road deaths in New Zealand numbered 442 at the end of February 2008. According to the DomPost,

The costs are huge - over $4 billion a year, equal to about a third of Government spending on health.

That's $9 million per death.

Let's double-check that. According to the Ministry of Transport in 2001,

The estimated social cost of a road death in New Zealand is
$2.485 million.

That's $5.3 million per death. Looks like the DomPost used the cost of all accidents - not just deaths.

But look at the most recent research I can find from Australia. This breakdown put the cost at $2.92 billion for 1700 deaths in 1996;

Cost of crashes by injury category were:
Fatal crashes:
$2.92 billion
Serious injury crashes:
$7.15 billion
Minor injury crashes:
$2.47 billion
Property damage only crashes:
$2.44 billion

A diagramatic analysis is shown here. Apparently,

Each fatal road crash costs the community more than $1.7 million.

Why the huge anomaly? I haven't the time to figure it out. It sure as hell isn't inflation. All I know is that the difference amounts to some $3.6 million a life. How we manage to be so much more valuable than the Aussies is something of a mystery when we earn considerably less. Perhaps our bureaucrats (propagandists) are simply more ambitious.