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Mr Moore: You opposed that one, too.

MR KAINE: But I am not ready to support this. Mr Moore, I listened to you quietly and carefully because I wanted to hear what you had to say. I think you have an obligation - and you talk about rights - to listen to what I have to say since I do not happen to share your view.

The Liberal Party does not have a policy on this matter. But there is one matter on which we are agreed, and it has been publicly stated: We will totally oppose any legislation that might require a doctor or a nurse to deliberately end a patient’s life. We have no policy on the Bill, but we are agreed on that matter. We will totally oppose any legislation that in effect talks about active euthanasia. That is what Mr Moore's Bill does. If you read his Bill, it nowhere gives the medical practitioner the right to decline.

Mr Moore: It does.

MR KAINE: No; it does not. The only concession that you make is that the medical practitioner, if he or she does not agree, can pass the case to somebody else.

Mr Moore: That is right; which means that they can, themselves, not agree to do it.

MR KAINE: No. Why place that onus on a medical practitioner who is treating somebody if he or she is asked to do something that it is not within his or her will to do? If the patient wants it, surely it is up to the patient to find somebody that will do it; not place the onus on the medical practitioner to find somebody that is willing to be the executioner. That, in my view, is totally unreasonable.

Mr Moore has been nibbling away at this for a long time. What he hopes is that by gradually gnawing away at it he will get to the stage where the active euthanasia that he publicly advocates will be publicly accepted in all of its dimensions. It is not going to stop here. If Mr Moore gets this Bill through, in 12 months’ time there will be another one seeking to push the forefront a little further forward. He keeps quoting overseas experience, but he does not talk about the downsides of overseas experience. He relies on these polls that have been conducted. I have a copy of the poll that was conducted in the ACT recently, playing on the emotions. This question was asked:

In your opinion, if a terminally ill patient, suffering unbearably, with no chance of recovery, asks for a lethal dose so as not to wake again, should a doctor be allowed to give a lethal dose or not?

There are some very interesting points in that question. It is very much in the third person. We are not talking about “me”; we are talking about all those other people out there. A terminally ill patient who is suffering unbearable pain and who has no chance of recovery is somebody else; not me. Under those circumstances, people will answer yes. But it is not necessarily the answer that they would give if they were in that situation.

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