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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 2 Hansard (26 February) . . Page.. 506 ..

MS REILLY (continuing):

It is about who is controlling the situation in relation to treatment. Does a doctor or the institution a person may be living in have control over what is happening, or is the patient or the person who is terminally ill the centre of any decision-making situation? Often, it is not the terminally ill who get any say in what happens.

We need to take away some of the myths about the time of dying. It is almost fallacious, at the end of the twentieth century, to talk about a time to die and about not interfering with this natural process. In fact, we have gone beyond natural death in a large number of circumstances. Medical technology has changed forever the meaning of natural death. In the discussions in the community, in information that has been sent to me and in the debate here today, there has been very little mention of medical technology and the impact it has on death at this stage of the twentieth century. Medical technology allows the prolonging of life beyond its capacity to have any quality or dignity, and we have to recognise this. I find quite shocking how little discussion there is about the introduction of various medical technologies. This is the major ethical issue we need to consider now, but we seem to concentrate on euthanasia instead of looking at all the aspects of death. It is not just a matter of pain relief; it is a matter of looking at the way in which people die. There are now many interventions that can change the process of dying from the way our forebears looked at it.

The other view that is often put is that voluntary euthanasia will become involuntary euthanasia. It is said that the safeguards in the legislation will not be sufficient, that euthanasia will become involuntary just through usage or slackness. We need to accept that involuntary euthanasia is happening now in our community, often through the actions of medical practitioners and others in the field. In some cases, it is left to the families to make the decision, leaving them open to possible future legal action. It is an unfair decision for any family to have to make.

I mention a study by Singer and Baume that replicated the Netherlands study done in about 1991. This was discussed on Radio National last week, and it has been printed in the Medical Journal of Australia. In the replication of the Netherlands study, 3,000 doctors in Australia were sent a questionnaire. The doctors were chosen on the basis that they had something to do with people who were dying. They worked with people in nursing homes, in hospitals, in palliative care, so they were doctors who had experience of death, which I think is an important part of the consideration of the results of the survey. The study found that 30 per cent of deaths in Australia were hastened in some way, and there were a variety of ways in which they were hastened. The finding of most interest to me was that in respect of 3.5 per cent of these deaths there was no request from the patient for the death. This figure is five times the involuntary euthanasia figure for the Netherlands, which is presented as the ogre, as though the introduction of legislation in the Netherlands has resulted in substantial involuntary euthanasia taking place. In Australia, we have no legislation, but we still have medical practitioners deciding when people should die through the actions they take. We have to ask: Who is making the decision in these situations? The medical practitioner is making the decision. Is that the person who should be making the decision? What about the rights of the individual, the rights of the terminally ill? This legislation looks at that and gives those rights back to the terminally ill person. That is an indication that this legislation will stop involuntary euthanasia in Australia. It provides protections; it provides safeguards.

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