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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 2 Hansard (26 February) . . Page.. 493 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

I can assure members here that I will be moving or supporting, as the case may be, whatever amendments are necessary to ensure that nobody is obliged to advise the dying of an option that they do not wish to advise people of.

Mr Humphries: It might not be possible to do that.

MR WHITECROSS: We will see when we get to the detail stage. Mr Speaker, I want to finish by talking briefly about the role of the law. Some view the law as a moral code by which we should all live. They say that it should specify all the choices that we should make in life. Mr Speaker, I do not think that is an acceptable view. I do not think that is a realistic view of the law. The law provides boundaries for society. It is not a strict code as to how we should behave. This legislation is designed to provide some of those boundaries.

Others, Mr Speaker, have argued that there are certain things which are too complex to be dealt with by legislation and that voluntary euthanasia is one of them. We cannot take that view. We are involved. We have banned voluntary euthanasia and it is therefore our responsibility to change the law if we want to allow these choices to be made. There are a lot of complex issues that we deal with in law. There are a lot of difficult and vexed problems that we deal with in law. Whether it is removing children from their parents, or whether it is assistance to victims of violence, there are a lot of difficult dilemmas that are faced in this society and law-makers have to grapple with those problems. That is our responsibility.

Mr Speaker, in voting on this I do not believe it is good enough for individual legislators to take a personal view. Our responsibility is to make laws for the peace, order and good government of the Territory. We must make laws which we believe will properly regulate society. The fact is that deaths occur deliberately involuntarily in hospitals without the consent of people. They happen in Australia, not just in Holland as Mr Osborne would like us to believe. This legislation provides an appropriate regulation of the manner and the opportunity for people to make use of the decision to use euthanasia.

Mrs Carnell, in her address, talked about multiculturalism and seemed to advance an argument that the diversity of opinion in our community about issues surrounding death and dying, and the additional complexity of that diversity added by our multicultural society, was somehow an argument against leaving these choices to the individual. Mr Speaker, in my opinion, Mrs Carnell's argument is exactly the opposite. It is an argument that these choices must be left to the individual because there is no one overarching moral imperative to which we all subscribe.

Mr Speaker, in conclusion, this is a choice which I believe must be made by the individual. Only the individual knows where the boundaries of tolerance lie. The objections, in my opinion, have been simplistic and have tended to debase the human condition rather than elevating it. I believe that this law is necessary because we have a responsibility to regulate, not just to prescribe, and this law provides appropriate boundaries in which decisions can be made in an open and honest way rather than in a closed backroom way which denies dignity and respect to the dying.

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