Page 2894 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 14 September 1994
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Mr Kaine also says that we place a very heavy legal onus on health professionals in our community, and indeed we do. We place an enormously heavy onus on them through this legislation. But, of course, we also place it on them now, and I think it is true to say that in many respects the onus is less heavy, the burden is less weighing down, if the framework in which they work is clear and understandable through the legislation. Doctors are operating at the moment, to some extent, in a legal void. They must make decisions about the level and appropriateness of treatment of their patients, and some practices which occur in our hospitals in respect of that are quite common. But others are left very much to the personal judgment of doctors, and there would be a divergence of practice, in part because doctors do not have any clear framework in which to operate. The argument about common law and statute law that we had last night comes up again. If we have the chance to make clear what the law says, we should do it through legislation. This is a very good example of where that should occur. Doctors themselves have supported this concept clearly for that very reason. They want to know where they stand.
My colleague Mr De Domenico has made the valid point that there does not appear to be a great clamour for this particular legislation. That is also obviously true. None of us have had huge delegations of doctors and nurses banging down our doors; but it is also clear, from looking at the transcript of the select committee, that doctors and nurses have strong views about this matter and also take the strong view about the need for there to be some protection. Those doctors and nurses were strongly of the view that there should be no active euthanasia, and I applaud that decision of theirs; but they also took the view that the present state of affairs was unsatisfactory. That is what comes out, to me, from reading that transcript. I might also point out that, if one looks through the notice paper, it is actually very hard to find on this program any legislation which might be said to be generated by the clamour of citizens of the ACT. Unfortunately, most of it is not.
Madam Speaker, in closing my remarks, I want to say that I do have one reservation about this legislation. It is the question about whether it is a first step, a slippery slide down the path to something worse. Mr Moore's agenda is quite open about that. The Government's is less so, as Mr De Domenico pointed out. The Government has an agenda of advancing active euthanasia in a timeframe and in a context which is not clear either to me or to any other citizen of the ACT. I still make it clear that my suspicion is that we will see a move on this question very soon after next year's election. If that is the case, if the Government has that intention, should they win, if it has even the suspicion that it wants to go down that path, it should say so firmly and clearly to the citizens of the Territory now, not after 18 February next year.
I do not think, however, that by codifying, if you like, the practices in our hospitals we necessarily open the door to this further unwarranted practice. It has not been the case, as far as I am able to determine, in either South Australia or Victoria, where legislation like this has been enacted.
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