Euthanasia

The Hon. S.W. KEY (Ashford) (15:41): I want to give an update to the house on what is happening in the voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide area. Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, as we know, have what is termed 'active euthanasia'. This is where a person has made an active and voluntary request to end their life. It is thought that they have had sufficient mental capacity to make an informed decision regarding their care, and it is also agreed that the person is suffering unbearably and that there is no prospect for improvement in their condition.

In other jurisdictions, there are types of assisted suicide and passive euthanasia that are legal. When I say 'passive euthanasia', I am talking about where a person causes death by withholding or withdrawing treatment that is necessary to maintain life, such as withholding antibiotics from someone who has pneumonia. Examples of this type of provision are in Switzerland, Germany, Mexico and now five American states. In California, Governor Jerry Brown has approved end-of-life measures to allow physicians to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to quicken the death of terminally ill patients.

It is interesting to note that, in the USA publication The Daily Beast, Governor Brown is described as a former Jesuit seminary student and quoted as saying that he has difficulty with approving assisted suicide law, saying he had to reflect on 'what I would want in the face of my own death'. Needless to say, California now follows other US states (Vermont, Oregon, Montana and Washington) in permitting assisted suicide to some patients.

I am told that the Californian law is based on the 1997 law in Oregon, with some changes. The Californian law has a 10-year, and I say this in inverted commas, 'sunset provision'. Doctors need to consult in private with their patients wishing to die to ensure that they know what they are requesting and also that no-one is coercing them. More than half the states, I am told, in the USA have been putting forward these sorts of bills, mainly to legalise some form of assisted suicide. Interestingly, it includes Washington DC.

Various medical organisations, like the California Medical Association, have changed their position of opposition to assisted suicide to that of a neutral position. Basically, when people campaign for voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide, they are asking not for the different medical organisations necessarily to support that change but to take a neutral position. Certainly, in California that is now the case, with their saying that this is a matter between the doctor and his or her patient.

The Guardian Australia publication recently reported that, in the Westminster system, Labour MP Rob Marris followed the lead from the longtime voluntary euthanasia campaigner, Lord Falconer, and that Marris' private member's bill proposed:

The assisted dying bill would allow doctors to prescribe a lethal dose to terminally ill patients judged to have six months or less to live and who request it.

Any patient would be assessed to ensure that they had formed a 'clear and settled intention' to end their life. The prescription would be subject to the approval of two doctors and a high court judge.

Sadly, this bill was not successful, but it would have permitted doctors to assist terminally ill patients to end their life on their direction.

One of the things I have found really challenging in looking at this sort of legislation, as I have said to the house before, is that advance care directives to me seem to be a priority. Most of us in our electorate offices would have people coming into our electorate offices asking us, as justices of the peace, to verify documents and also talk to us about what sort of process they needed to go through to make clear their end-of-life intentions.

I do take some claim in there being successful legislation that has been introduced and operating for the last couple of years, but I think it is about time for us now to look at that legislation and make sure that it is easy to process and also easy to change if someone does change their end-of-life intentions.