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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (5 November) . . Page.. 3659 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

I will be supporting this Bill. I agree with Mr Berry that we should remove the requirement in this legislation for the living will, shall we say, or the making of a direction to be only with regard to the current condition, so I am happy to support that part of it as well.

MS TUCKER (4.25): I will speak first to the Euthanasia Referendum Bill. The Greens will not be supporting this Bill. Of course, the issue of euthanasia is very significant, and we would say yes to the questions put forward by Mr Moore in the Bill if we were asked. Ms Horodny and I have both publicly expressed our support for voluntary active euthanasia and supported Mr Moore's previous Euthanasia Bill in the Assembly. We were also very disappointed that the Federal Parliament passed the Andrews Bill, which restricted the ACT's power to legislate on euthanasia.

However, we do not feel we can support the Euthanasia Referendum Bill, because we do not believe that the holding of a government-sponsored referendum on euthanasia is the appropriate way of progressing this issue. It is not that we do not believe that euthanasia is an important enough issue, but we want to maintain consistency in how referenda are used in the ACT. We regard Mr Moore's Bill as essentially a type of citizen-initiated referendum, and the holding of CIRs has yet to be agreed to by this Assembly. We believe it would be much better for the Assembly to resolve the CIR issue before it responds to ad hoc requests for referenda like this.

There are some specific problems with holding this particular referendum under the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act. At present government-sponsored referenda are usually held to decide on proposed changes to the process of government. Referenda are traditionally used as a way of allowing decisions to be made by the community as a whole in situations where politicians could be perceived as having a conflict of interest in deciding on issues that directly affect their future roles and activities. At the Federal level, various referenda have been held over the years on amendments to the Australian Constitution. In the ACT we have had a referendum about changing the system of voting in Assembly elections.

The Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act was specifically based on the Commonwealth legislation that deals with constitutional referendum reform. However, Mr Moore's Bill is essentially asking for people's views on a particular social issue, that is, euthanasia. It cannot change the existing legislative controls over euthanasia. It is essentially a form of public opinion poll, the results of which could then be used to put political pressure on the opponents of euthanasia. The Greens have no problem with groups in the community who are concerned about a particular issue undertaking such polls, getting signatures on petitions and lobbying politicians; that is what democracy is about. But we do have problems with the government doing this work.

There is the issue of consistency here. If we are going to have a referendum on euthanasia, then why not have referenda on the myriad of other issues raised in this Assembly? Those people who support citizen-initiated referenda would probably love to have lots of referenda like this. We, therefore, see a danger in supporting this Bill.

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