Budget funding for sleep health awareness

9 February 2026

The ASA has joined forces with the Sleep Health Foundation to call for Federal Budget funding for sleep health awareness.

"Our joint pre-budget submission has highlighted the urgent need for factual, evidence-based sleep health awareness communication in Australian communities," says the ASA's CEO, Marcia Balzer.

"This move was one of the recommendations of the 2019 Parliamentary Inquiry into Sleep Health Awareness, and the need has only grown more urgent in the intervening years. The public are now bombarded with contradictory, commerce-driven sleep health 'advice' that is not always helpful and even occasionally harmful."

The pre-budget submission Debunking the myths about sleep calls for $20 million funding for a public awareness campaign to help Australians "Check, Choose. Snooze." - check the facts, choose evidence, and snooze well.

"This type of broad-based sleep health awareness campaign was also one of the recommendations of the Federal Government-commissioned policy evidence review released in 2023 Sleep: a core pillar of health and wellbeing," Ms Balzer said, while also underlining the importance of sleep health to other key government health policy priorities.

"The stage is set like never before. The ASA's 4-year Commonwealth-funded education programs have primed 35,000 healthcare providers to recognise and respond to sleep health problems, and clinical pathways have been developed to manage increasing demands for evidence-based care. 

"A coordinated, well-funded national sleep health awareness campaign is now needed to address the shortfall in public awareness of healthy sleep and the urgent recent increase in misinformation," Ms Balzer concluded.

Read the submission