Personal Explanation

VOLUNTARY EUTHANASIA

The Hon. M. PARNELL (15:46): I seek leave to make a personal explanation.

Leave granted.

The Hon. M. PARNELL: Yesterday, in speaking to the Consent to Medical Treatment and Palliative Care (End of Life Arrangements) Amendment Bill, I referred to various recent cases that highlighted the need for voluntary euthanasia law reform. In my speech, I highlighted an unnamed case from Western Australia and said that the person involved was terminally ill. That was incorrect. I would now like to correct the record and acknowledge that the Western Australian case involved a Mr Christian Rossiter, who was not terminally ill but was suffering from severe quadriplegia and had asked for his feeding tube to be removed from his stomach because he no longer wished to live.

The evidence before the court was that he was not dying from his condition and he could live for many more years. However, there was no doubt about his ability to understand his condition and to make reasoned choices on his own behalf. He described his life as a 'living hell'. Mr Rossiter died on 21 September 2009 from a chest infection, 5½ weeks after the Western Australian Supreme Court confirmed his right to refuse food and medicine.

On the evidence available about Mr Rossiter's case, if he were a South Australian resident, he would have not have qualified as a person able to request voluntary euthanasia due to being in the terminal phase of a terminal illness. However, it is likely that he would have qualified under the second criterion in the bill, namely, as a person 'who has an illness, injury or other medical condition (other than a mental illness within the meaning of the Mental Health Act 2009) that irreversibly impairs the person's quality of life so that life has become intolerable to that person and who desires to end their suffering by means of voluntary euthanasia administered in accordance with the Act'.