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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 10 Hansard (24 September) . . Page.. 3185 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

Now I will deal with offence notices. There is another important provision of this Bill. Under this Bill, where assistance to commit suicide appears to have been provided by a medical practitioner and the matter is investigated by the police, the medical practitioner may be served with an offence notice. The offence notice is described in clause 6 of the Bill. As with other infringement notice systems in ACT legislation, payment of the set penalty would result in no further proceedings. The offence notice penalties proposed in this Bill are: Firstly, where the person has administered the lethal dose themselves, in the same scenario that Dr Nitschke used in the Northern Territory, then the penalty in accordance with, as I perceive, those community standards should be 0.5 of a penalty unit, or in current terms $50. Secondly, where the medical practitioner has administered the substance themselves, the penalty should be three penalty units, or the equivalent in today's terms of $300.

The Bill also provides for protection of medical practitioners from other penalties associated with their action. Where they have acted within the framework described in this Bill, they cannot be found to be guilty of misconduct or unethical conduct by their peers or be disciplined or prevented from practising medicine. It has been suggested by some critics of this approach and of the Bill already tabled in the Northern Territory by Mr John Bailey, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition there, that offence notices go too far towards "having the effect of permitting" euthanasia, to use the words of the Commonwealth Act. I do not accept this criticism, and the weight of legal opinion on this question also seems to confirm my view.

The Northern Territory Attorney-General, Denis Burke, sought three legal opinions on the Bailey infringement notice proposal. Mr Speaker, I seek leave to table those opinions.

Leave granted.

MR MOORE: Thank you, members. The weight of opinion is that his approach operates within the legislation set down by the Federal Parliament. The legislation presented to you today is even more obviously within the powers left to the Assembly by the Euthanasia Laws Act 1997. In the circumstances described in this Bill, it is important to ensure, of course, that there is no possibility that somebody would gain financially, either directly or indirectly, from such actions. Under such circumstances, sections 4 and 5 of this Act would not apply, and the full weight of the current Crimes Act would apply in those circumstances, with the maximum penalty of 10 years. In other words, what this legislation does is set out to reflect community values, but it clarifies a position that is very unclear in current legislation and in common law.

In conclusion, Mr Speaker, it seems to me that, following the Euthanasia Laws Act passing through both houses of the Federal Parliament, we have a series of choices. The first choice we can make is that we can be a quitter; we can give up. There are those who are considering the possibility of simply quitting - no longer dealing with this issue - on the ground that the Federal Government has made a decision and there is nothing we can do about it. To such people I say, "Compare the issue to a major cut in workers' conditions or a major cut in wages". If such a cut were made by the Federal Parliament,

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