Page 1743 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 17 October 1989
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Mr Wood would agree with me, that the various organisations to which we have been talking, including the Voluntary Euthanasia Society of New South Wales and the Council on the Ageing, would be very pleased indeed to see this Bill with whatever emendations may be added to it or extracted from it. I also wish to endorse it with pleasure.
MR HUMPHRIES (4.06): I, as my colleague has indicated, share with my party the sense of pleasure that this Bill has been introduced in the Assembly. We see it as a positive and constructive measure, and we welcome it. It provides mechanisms for assisting incapacitated people before they reach their incapacity, either through their fear of what may occur or through their good sense to plan in advance what things may happen to them, to provide for the creation of an enduring power of attorney of a kind which is not presently available. This, as my colleague Mr Collaery has indicated, will be of assistance both to people who are injured and also to the aged.
I think it is astonishing, Mr Speaker, that so often in this country and elsewhere the law follows changes in social behaviour rather than leads them. I am reminded that it was only, I think, at the beginning of the last century that trial by combat was abolished as a formal part of the English statute law.
Mr Duby: What a shame!
MR HUMPHRIES: "What a shame!", says Mr Duby. Perhaps he imagines it still exists in one form or another. But that is an example, I think - and not, unfortunately, an isolated example - of how the law is much too far behind the social realities of the society in which it operates. We occasionally see - more often these days, I will concede - pieces of legislation which are designed to change social behaviour and to lead people into a better way of doing things in terms of what arrangements might have been made in the past. I am pleased to see that this particular Bill falls in that category.
Some people in the past, as lawyers will know, have sought to cover the situation provided for in this Bill, but until now that position has not been available. I am hopeful that with the passage of this Bill it will be possible for ordinary people, who fear that they may incur some problem in the future or who are simply getting old, to take steps to provide effectively for the management of their affairs and, indeed, their own bodies when that eventuality befalls them.
I am also very pleased to see the "plain English" nature of this power of attorney. Any of us who have had to deal in the past with powers of attorney will recall the four- to six-page documents of closely written legalese which was almost indecipherable. I would be surprised if anybody has read that document in many years, but it is still widely used by lawyers in creating powers of attorney. This
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