Page 3198 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 September 1994
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does not help to go through that process. I think I have a far better chance by not proceeding with a Bill like this and going for it all at once, rather than the contrary. What happened is that the committee decided that this was necessary and that it was appropriate that we proceed. It is necessary for a series of reasons, and some of those were reflected in a call-in on the radio this morning.
The reasons are, first of all, that people want to be able to make the decision themselves that life support systems be removed, instead of it being made, in the majority of cases now, by the family and the medical practitioner. That is the first thing. The second thing - this also is important - is that whilst this remains in the common law there is always the possibility that a medical practitioner will be taken to court and a judge will make a decision different from the way the common law has grown up. A new decision, a landmark decision, will be made. That is much more difficult when we have black letter law that shows the current community standards. That is one of the prime reasons why legislation similar to this was passed in Victoria and in South Australia.
I want to point out the difficulties that have been raised with this Bill. One of the most vehement people in presenting those difficulties - I imagine that you have seen the papers - is a Mrs Karen Clark, who has a PhD from Harvard and is somebody we would take very seriously. The committee went to Melbourne and met with her. She had put forward a whole range of criticisms about the original Bill, arguing that it simply would not work in practice. I pointed out to her that some provisions were taken directly from the South Australian legislation that has been working very effectively there for quite a number of years. Sometimes - and we all do this - when we have a particular point that we wish to make, we look at what arguments we can find to support that point and run through those arguments. I think that the work in that case suffered from that. We recognise, whenever we pass legislation, that there is always some risk - and we weigh up that risk - that it will be misused. Of course, we seek to minimise that risk, and we also seek to minimise people's fear of how it might be misused or misrepresented.
This Bill does none of those things. This Bill is simple, it is straightforward, and it is about passive euthanasia. If somebody wishes to argue in court what this Bill is about, they can go back to the Hansard and read that I said again and again that this is about passive euthanasia. It is not about active euthanasia. It was never intended to be. The will of the committee, clearly, was that we provide for people to be able to make their own end-of-life decisions beforehand in fear of being in the sort of circumstances in which some people wind up when, for example, having had a stroke, the only way they survive is by means of life support systems.
Madam Speaker, it was a great surprise to me that some members were so vehement in their opposition to this Bill. It was the sort of vehemence and opposition I expected to active euthanasia proposals, and I have no difficulty with that. I think that the arguments presented are really arguments that apply to an active euthanasia Bill, not a Bill which provides for people to make their own decisions about whether they are going to continue with medical treatment or not. I suggest to members that they reconsider the legislation in front of them and realise that it is a positive move, both for patients and for doctors.
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