Page 4386 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 19 November 1991
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It may be that present members of the Parliamentary Labor Party have no difficulty with this policy of the Labor Party on euthanasia. Whether that is the case for future members I could not say. It is unfortunate in the extreme that we have moved away from a situation, which to my knowledge has always been the case in every parliamentary party everywhere in this country, where issues such as this are matters of personal conscience. I hope that in future, despite the strong personal views of members of the Australian Labor Party, they never find themselves in a position of being constrained by party views on such an intimately personal matter as this.
My personal view is fairly clear. I believe that life is sacred and that therefore it is inappropriate for governments to prescribe circumstances which compromise the sacredness of that life. My objections to the proposals that have come before the community, and I put it in those broad terms because I have seen proposals from the Voluntary Euthanasia Society on this question, and I assume that other members have as well, concern the many unanswered questions - indeed, in my view, unanswerable questions - surrounding euthanasia.
If I might summarise what I see as the proposal being put forward by this organisation, it is that individual people could enter into agreements or contracts with their doctors to terminate their lives, either at the point of execution of those documents or at some point in the future, if certain circumstances or conditions are fulfilled. That, as I understand it, is very broadly the nature of the proposal. It gives me grave concern, for a number of reasons which I will now outline.
First of all, I believe fundamentally that a change of this kind must affect the doctor-patient relationship, not just in the case of the particular individuals who enter into contracts between themselves and their doctors but also in the case of every person who is treated by a doctor. In a very real sense, this provides a very new, very potent, symbolically important power to a doctor. A doctor has the capacity to end a patient's life without consent. I say "without consent" advisedly because, as I understand this proposal, it is possible - in fact, quite likely - that a patient will be unconscious or unable to make a rational decision because of intense pain or mental condition, in which circumstance the doctor would have to exercise a discretion about terminating that patient's life.
What is clearly happening, in my view, is that the patient's life is being ended without any express consent to that happening at that particular time. The patient may well have given to a doctor, at some point in the past, an authority to end that patient's life in certain circumstances, if certain conditions eventuate in the future. None of us has the capacity to know exactly what life will bring us. None of us knows exactly what
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