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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 2 Hansard (26 February) . . Page.. 437 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

The three inquiries emphasised that the appropriate response of civilised societies was not to kill the elderly, lonely, sick or depressed, but rather to commend the development and growth of palliative care services. None of them found killing to be an acceptable form of care. The Canadian inquiry looked at claims of public support for euthanasia. A majority of the members of that committee were "sceptical as to the validity of opinion polls often cited ... in favour of changes to the existing laws. They are concerned with the acceptance of such poll results at face value without close analysis of the questions asked and the knowledge of the respondents with respect to the issues raised". The professor of law and medicine at McGill University, speaking in Sydney in 1995, noted that, while North American opinion polls regularly indicated support in excess of 80 per cent for euthanasia, when it came to formal voting the highest percentage in favour was only 45 per cent. The comment is of great significance here and now because we are asked to make a decision in light of - and I use the term advisedly - similar local polling.

Mr Speaker, pollsters often frame their questions so as to get the answer they seek, and that is not news to anybody. For example, consider this question: If an incurable patient suffering great pain asks for a lethal dose from which they will not awake, should the doctor be allowed to give that lethal dose or not? Such a question loads the respondent with a collection of linked issues, some of them emotive, to all of which only a single yes or no answer is allowed. The words are emotionally loaded - "incurable", "great pain", "termination", "will not awake". We should not accept polls without careful study of how they were conducted, who were the respondents, and to what drum those commissioning the poll were marching.

The common law has long recognised that it is licit for a patient to refuse medical treatment. Our own law makes that licit. Legislation to give patients autonomy to make decisions about their medical treatment is unnecessary. Legislation to empower patients to request a medical professional to press a button or depress the plunger of a syringe to end life is not necessary either. Mankind has applied progressive levels of sophistication to the problem of terminal illness since it learnt to fashion tools and use fire. The ability of modern technology to let a person end his or her own life by touching a computer screen does not alter the fact that there has to be active precedent complicity by others in setting everything up to make the touch effective at the other end of the line.

That is significantly different from the sound principle of medicine that no person should be required to endure treatment which is futile or unduly burdensome. We have all heard about people being kept alive in hospital long after hope of recovery has passed, for the sake of the income to the hospital which that treatment represents. We should all abhor such practices while supporting the rights of patients and families to choose that course of action. In one American study, Mr Speaker, patients diagnosed as having "advanced cancer in its terminal stage" did not have cancer at all. In one American State a court ruled legislation permitting assisted suicide unconstitutional for, among other reasons, discriminating against the elderly, the infirm and others by not according them equal protection under the law. These are issues that we need to think about very carefully.

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