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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 2 Hansard (26 February) . . Page.. 435 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

in my view, in that provision. The patient has the total determination of what treatment he or she will receive while approaching a natural death. Under present law, however, no person has the stigma of being obliged to take deliberate action to perform against another person that worst of actions which one human may take against another.

Mr Speaker, I am all for compassion and alleviation of suffering, for allowing people to end their lives with dignity, whatever the cause recorded on the death certificate. I do not support a measure that will allow the ending of a life to become a media circus, to distress not only the relatives of the suffering person but also the medical professional who in good faith and compassion supervised the termination, and I mean such a circus as we witnessed in the Northern Territory only a few short weeks ago.

I am all for invoking strict legal sanctions against any person who knowingly and deliberately takes the life of another, for any reason. This is a principle which civilised man has embraced for millennia, and we should not lightly cast it aside. Wiser heads than any in this place have contributed to the debates that gave rise to that principle.

I am all for making the final period of life as comfortable and tolerable as medical science and compassionate principles of management are capable of providing. If this Territory is to show leadership in the matter of comforting those whose lives are coming to their end, let it be leadership in developing palliative treatments and management practices that will bring care professionals here to learn from us.

I am all for doing nothing more to provide further material for ignorant media elsewhere in Australia to use in uninformed slanging of this Territory. I am not talking about Canberra bashing; that is a fact of life. What I am talking about is the kind of morbid attention that media would focus on us if this Assembly should pass Mr Moore's Bill and the Commonwealth does not invalidate it. Surely we have better things to do than fend off media beat-ups about decriminalised murder.

So far in this debate, and in other previous debates, Mr Speaker, I have spoken in general terms about what we have, and what I support. I would now like to draw the attention of members to what other legislatures in other polities have concluded after searching inquiries into this subject. It is not a new subject at all. There have been three important inquiries undertaken within the last four years and none of them can be categorised as pro-life or tied to any religious denomination. They are the inquiry of the Select Committee on Medical Ethics in the House of Lords, which reported in January of 1994; a report by the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, presented in May of 1994; and the report of the Canadian Special Senate Committee on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide tabled in June 1995. By any measure, these reports merit close attention. I have referred to them in this Assembly in the past, and I will continue to do so if this topic ever comes before us again, because I consider them to offer a balanced view free of prejudice.

Each of those inquiries rejected the decriminalisation of euthanasia. Some members of the New York task force believed that providing a quick death can respect the autonomy of some patients and demonstrate care and commitment on the part of medical professionals.

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