Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have great respect for my friend the member for Fenner, but I could not disagree with him more fundamentally on a more fundamental issue than the issue of territory euthanasia laws. The Constitution gives the Commonwealth parliament the plenary power to make laws about territories, whether they are island territories or mainland territories. They are not states, and we regularly use the territories power in a whole range of things. The Northern Territory had a referendum on whether to be a state some years ago, and they voted against it.

I am a federalist, but, for me, matters of life and death trump all concerns of constitutional questions, and I believe that euthanasia laws have no place on the statute books of any parliament in this country. My only criticism of the Andrews law is not that it overrides territory laws, but that we didn't, at that stage, find a way to override state laws as well in relation to these matters. I think some thought needs to be put into that, because I regard the euthanasia laws that exist in our states as bad and as an attack on some fundamental values that underpin our society as a whole.

I want to acknowledge that there are people in our country that are in pain and are not getting the level of care that they require. There was a very good, but not heralded enough, publication that came out from the PM Glynn Institute of the Australian Catholic University recently called A snapshot of palliative care services in Australia. Its author Dr Chris Abbu found a number of key things. First, the number of people being hospitalised for palliative care is growing at an average rate of five per cent a year, and services are not keeping pace. Second, the rate of palliative care hospitalisations for children under 15 has increased by more than 10 per cent annually since 2012-13, but palliative care is not a well-regarded specialty that students are choosing to go into. And, third, models of palliative care that give people not just the chance to experience end-of-life care in hospitals, but to do so in homes, are not well advanced enough in this country, and I think about the palliative care in the home model that is pioneered by the San, just outside my electorate, which I've spoken about previously in this chamber.

Why is palliative care important? Because properly funded palliative care must be a national priority. I note that in the recent federal budget we announced an additional $58.7 million of measures for palliative care. But let me quote Dr Michael Casey, the chief executive of the PM Glynn Institute, in relation to the report. He said:

People say voluntary-assisted dying is about giving patients a choice but if dying patients cannot access the palliative care services they need, they don't really have a free choice …

We need to do more to ensure that everyone who needs good quality palliative care can access it, wherever they are and whatever their circumstances, before considering a momentous step like—

euthanasia. I should say that the report also found the ACT has the best access to public palliative care of any jurisdiction: 22 palliative care hospitalisations per 10,000, and they've seen an annual increase of 13.6 per cent between 2013-14 and 2017-18.

The member for Fenner also mentioned the Northern Territory laws. I remember the woman who was the poster child of the Northern Territory laws advertised on television saying: 'Please, let me die. Please, let me die.' Well, she got better. She lived, and she became an opponent of those same laws. The nature of euthanasia is that it ends lives and that it is so fundamental. We know that people have different responses to treatment over time. We also hear that euthanasia laws won't affect that many people. In Victoria, they predicted that only 12 people would die by euthanasia in the first year, and yet there were 272 eligible applications and 124 deaths. We often think about euthanasia in the context of very old people, but the youngest person to die by euthanasia in Victoria was 36. Is that what we really want in our community and in our country? The latest statistics from Victoria show that 94 people died by euthanasia in the six months to the end of 2020, and this in a state where the increase in mental health presentations rose 23 per cent.

Is it any wonder that the AMA in every jurisdiction in which euthanasia laws have been proposed have been a trenchant opponent? Is it any wonder that in Western Australia our colleagues and friends Minister Wyatt and Senator Dodson so strongly opposed those laws there because of the disproportionate effect on vulnerable Indigenous people? When Andrew Denton cannot rule out the application of these laws to people with dementia, I think we are on a very slippery slope. I very strongly oppose this motion.

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