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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 9 Hansard (22 November) . . Page.. 2249 ..

MR OSBORNE: I must be hitting a raw nerve, Mr Speaker. Mr Speaker, if I were looking at Mr Moore's arguments on their face value just from the point of view of the odd individual choice, I could not be anything but sympathetic. Even now I am sympathetic. I am not going to stand up here and point my finger and condemn someone else. What I needed to do was look at the whole picture, the fine print, before I stood up and took him on. The challenge to me was to go beyond my own Christian beliefs and look at this from a non-Christian point of view. It would be very easy for me to stand up and say that I am against it because I am a Catholic and I am a Christian. It would be a very short statement from me. But the more I went into it and the more I looked at it, the more I became convinced that if people with no belief in God knew the long-term social ramifications they would be totally opposed to it, as I am.

The presumption that euthanasia should be legalised works on a false assumption, or at least a questionable one. Is the morality of euthanasia accepted by the community? A recent survey asked the community whether, in their opinion, if a terminally ill patient suffering unbearably with no chance of recovery asked for a lethal dose so as not to awaken again, a doctor should be allowed to give a lethal dose. Seventy-five per cent of 500 people said yes. However, this reflects somewhat woolly thinking about the facts of euthanasia and palliative care.

Dr Brian Pollard, a man who has had extensive first-hand contact with the sufferers and their families, has reflected and written at length on euthanasia. He notes that cancer is the main cause of terminal illness. Good palliative care today is such that pain caused by cancer can be reduced to at least tolerable levels. He notes that what is often referred to as unbelievable pain may be and usually is a condition that some doctor has not relieved or knows how to relieve on which he has not consulted an expert for assistance. The recent survey could equally have asked, "If a doctor is so negligent as to leave a terminally ill person in severe pain for whatever reason - severe enough to drive that person to ask to be killed - should the doctor then be able to compound his negligence by killing his patient instead of seeking help?". I suggest, Mr Speaker, that the survey would have perhaps had a different result and the facts could have thrown the whole debate into a new light. Mr Speaker, I would suggest that the overwhelming majority of people, upon hearing my arguments, would have an entirely different attitude from the one Mr Moore claims they have. As for his mandate, we all have a mandate to try something in here, no matter how distorted the argument may be.

Mr Speaker, I turn to the law and voluntary euthanasia. It is noteworthy and by far the most compelling thing to me that no code of ethics or law has ever suggested that anyone has a right to kill. This is so, Mr Speaker, because, to state the obvious, the right to life is the most basic right we have. It is inalienable. It can be forfeited and should be forfeited only in the case of an unjust aggressor, be it an individual or a community. This ensures, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, that we all have equality at law. However you cut it, however you try to pretend it is not so, to legalise euthanasia you would have to say this: "Innocent life can now be killed". It is essential to understand this. If you allow euthanasia on the grounds that the quality of a person's life is such that their life is no longer worth living, then all life as we know it is de facto

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