Page 996 - Week 03 - Thursday, 21 March 2019
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important report. I believe that the extent of unanimity in this difficult area is important because it means that those people who are having to deal with the recommendations cannot cast them off as being something insignificant. They are not insignificant.
I will start where Ms Cheyne ended, that is, the end of the report and the chapter about voluntary assisted dying. There is some mild dissent from me and Mrs Kikkert in this chapter. The chapter is without a substantive recommendation, by agreement with the committee, on the basis that the ACT cannot legislate in this space. I will not get into that. I have expressed my views on that in the past. Because we cannot legislate in this space, it is a little superfluous to make recommendations about a voluntary assisted dying scheme.
The chapter has in it about six or seven extensive paragraphs, with extensive footnoting, about what the majority of the committee think that a voluntary assisted dying scheme should look like if we ever got to that. But it is not a recommendation of this committee.
It is also worth noting that we had a substantial number of submissions to the inquiry—nearly 500. Of those, 274 came from residents of the ACT. It is worth noting and putting on the record what is said on page 89 of the report. Of the 274 people from the ACT who submitted, 160 were opposed to a voluntary assisted dying scheme and 108 were in favour. There were six submitters from the ACT who did not express a view either way on a voluntary assisted dying scheme. It is worth noting that, on the basis of the submissions received from ACT residents, there is not support in the community for voluntary assisted dying.
Turning to recommendations 1 through 24, all of which are unanimous and agreed, I am very proud to be part of a committee that has put forward such a range and collection of thoughtful recommendations about issues which are vital to the people of the ACT. They are issues which, when you contemplate them, have been ignored, not thought about or not valued as much as they should be.
It has been a long time in the ACT since we have made legislative change in the area of advance care directives or enduring powers of attorney in relation to medical decision-making, and it is quite clear that we are not as up to date as we should be. It is also quite clear that most of us in the community are probably not as informed as we should be about our rights, our responsibilities and the things that we should do to protect ourselves and our loved ones from inappropriate pressure and inappropriate decision-making because we in our lifetime have been silent or have not thought about what we might like for ourselves as we approach the end of our days on earth. It is timely that we spend some time and think about this as an Assembly and as a community, and that we encourage people in our community to be more engaged.
We heard a lot of evidence from the medical profession and elsewhere that there does not seem to be an appropriate locus of responsibility for advance care planning. There is not a place where it naturally falls to someone to say to a member of the public, “Have you thought about this? Are you prepared, if something happens and you fall
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