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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 9 Hansard (22 November) . . Page.. 2260 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

No humane, compassionate person wants people to suffer unnecessarily, and at the first glance, euthanasia appears to offer relief to the suffering. Unfortunately, one has to take into account human nature.

I have quoted some statistics from the Netherlands - they are commonly known - and I have quoted the reservations of people in such places as the House of Lords, the Canadian Senate and the State of New York on that issue. Again without reading the whole letter, she goes on:

Doctors with long experience in dealing with the dying say that terminally ill patients hardly ever ask to have their lives ended. Why then the impulsive, unthinking, undemocratic push for euthanasia?

Secondly, introducing even a restricted form of euthanasia opens a pandora's box of fear and suffering. Pressure from the euthanasia lobby and others would then be exerted to extend the categories of persons who can be killed, a question raised by other eminent experts in the matter.

Thirdly, the practice of euthanasia brutalises its practitioners. That is, once doctors and nurses become accustomed to killing, they lose the compassion and care they formerly had for the sick and dying.

Fourth, old, sick or disabled people will feel pressured to offer themselves to be killed so as not to be a burden on their relatives or on hospital staff. People will be afraid to go to their doctor, into a nursing home or hospital.

Euthanasia is an inhumane cop-out in a climate of escalating health costs. People already have a right to refuse medical treatment which they find burdensome, and this is not euthanasia.

Finally, pressure will be exerted on doctors and nurses, et cetera, to perform euthanasia against their beliefs and their will. A Bill may theoretically provide against this, but in practice it does not work.

This is not necessarily one of the world's great thinkers; this is an ordinary citizen out there who has obviously thought about this subject. She reaches much the same conclusions as eminent people in the House of Lords, the Canadian Senate and the State of New York. I believe that for us to ignore the ordinary citizens of the ACT, to ignore a vascular surgeon who is in touch with the matter constantly, to ignore, incidentally, the words of the Australian Association for Hospices and Palliative Care, which I have not quoted but which raises some very real words of caution about the matter, and to set aside the decisions of some very eminent people throughout the world on this issue is something this Assembly should not contemplate. For those reasons, I will not support this Bill.

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