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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 9 Hansard (22 November) . . Page.. 2262 ..

MR CONNOLLY (continuing):

facing unbearable distress and pain - pain in the psychological sense. I assume that there will be a view that that would not be lawful under the Moore Bill. You define pain or distress, and I think you could well mount an argument that there could be a mental health condition or, indeed, acute depression that could at least meet the definition of distress. You then have the question of terminal phase and terminal illness, which again are difficult to define and could raise difficulties for a person who had repeatedly attempted to be suicidal. Could that be a terminal phase of a terminal condition? I do not know.

The issue of euthanasia raises grave difficulties. I am essentially compelled not to support this Bill from my concerns about what the state sanctioning death as an option would mean for our community. It is a fundamental of all societies that death should not be a state-sanctioned option - other than in communities where there is a criminal penalty of death, and I say that they are wrong. For the state to sanction death in these circumstances, to me, opens a Pandora's box and dehumanises and desensitises the state. I do find validity in the so-called slippery slope arguments, as I am pleased to see do other thinkers, many of whom approach the question from an acceptance of the principle of voluntary euthanasia. Again, in Lanham's paper not only does he make the point that the Dutch experience should make us wary, but also he argues, and I think with some compulsion, that it is very difficult to keep a line between voluntary and non-voluntary euthanasia. He says that you can draw a line, and I would accept this, between those two and involuntary euthanasia, which any legislative body can always treat as murder.

It is very easy to move from the principle we start off with - that we should sanction the election by a person who is conscious and able to make a decision for intervention to end their life - to the proposition that a person who would have made such a decision should be able to end a life. One could see that the next step, were the Moore Bill to be law, would be a living will provision attached to the Moore Bill, which indeed many people favour. The step beyond that would be to take the normal practice that we as legislators take of guardianship law, where it is appropriate when a person is unable to make an informed decision for themselves that a body like the Guardianship Tribunal should be able to make that decision for them. That is the difficulty.

A further difficulty was well expressed in a paper that Lindsay Tanner wrote in the Melbourne Herald-Sun a couple of weeks ago. Lindsay Tanner is one of the younger members of the Federal Parliament, a Labor member from Melbourne, and is regarded as one of the deeper thinkers, I think, on the Left of politics at the moment. His argument has been made by many others; I am not ascribing this particularly to Lindsay Tanner. He starts his argument by expressing sympathy with people who wish to end their lives and acceptance that the practice occurs, but he says that there is a concern that, if euthanasia becomes an accepted option, if the state sanctions euthanasia, it creates subtle changes in the way we think about health care delivery.

I know, as a person who has been a Health Minister, and this is usually not expressly stated, that the reality is that health care in Australia, as in every community, is rationed. We do not have unlimited resources to provide health care. Once you accept that the state says that euthanasia - the ending of a life, the active involvement of a doctor to end a life - is a state-sanctioned option, it subtly shifts the balance, the sense of obligation of patients, the sense of patients that "Perhaps I should do the right thing". I am worried about the generation of people who have lived through wars and depressions and who

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