Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I'm happy to rise to support this legislation which will provide the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory with the capacity to regulate a practice which occurs every day in palliative care wards around Australia, which is medical professionals acting out of compassion and humanity to assist people to end their lives. This bill, as many speakers have said, would allow those territories the ability to make laws in relation to voluntary assisted dying. This isn't simply a vote on the issue of whether or not a person has the right in the final stages of life, under certain circumstances, to end their life; it's about the ability of territories to enact their own laws and to respect the autonomy of their people and their parliaments.

It's important to note this is essentially a redrafted bill to get the outcome that we believe, based on poll after poll, the community wants. All Greens MPs will be supporting it. I, along with my colleagues, have a view that, regardless of whether you live in a state or a territory in Australia, you ought to have access to compassionate end-of-life choices and that these choices ought to include a well-funded palliative care system as well as access to voluntary assisted dying. I reject the notion that those two things are incompatible, and those who would seek to present this debate as a choice between a well-funded, well-run palliative care system and access to voluntary assisted dying are trying to present people and this parliament with a false choice.

It's a matter of historical record that the Greens have campaigned and led on the issue of voluntary assisted dying for a long time—from Bob Brown's private member's bill back in 1997 through to Senator Di Natale's bill on the territory rights, which is the basis for the bill that we are now debating. As the previous speaker, Senator Singh, pointed out, there have been opportunities for both her and I to vote in the Tasmanian parliament for voluntary euthanasia. That was firstly in 2009 when I was the sole sponsor of a bill to provide for a voluntary assisted dying framework in Tasmania and, again, in 2013, when I co-sponsored a bill with then Premier Lara Giddings. The first bill, in 2009, was defeated 15 votes to seven in the Tasmanian House of Assembly—and I want to thank Senator Singh for standing up to pressure within the Labor Party at the time and voting for that bill. The second bill was defeated by, as Senator Singh said, a single vote in 2013. That is a matter that is of some regret to me today, as I genuinely believe we had the numbers in the upper house to get that through at the time, and that would have led to Tasmania being the first state to legislate for a voluntary assisted dying framework.

As I said earlier, we currently have both voluntary and involuntary euthanasia or assisted dying occurring on an ad hoc basis in palliative care wards in Australia, and this is a relatively common occurrence. It's important for people to know that this is being done with no formal system of safeguards to protect the rights of patients and, importantly, protect the rights of the medical professionals who, for the best of reasons, based on their compassion and their humanity, are assisting people to die in palliative care wards every day in this country. To those who say in an argument against voluntary assisted dying frameworks, 'What about the vulnerable people who might be exploited or influenced or coerced under the provisions of such a framework?' I say back to them, 'What about the vulnerable people who are being assisted to die in palliative care wards around Australia on a regular basis?' They are being provided with assisted dying with no formal protection and no safeguards and the doctors and medical professionals, who, for the best of reasons—and I absolutely support them in doing this—are conducting those voluntary and involuntary assisted deaths in palliative care wards, are doing so with no legal protection whatsoever.

If people doubt what I'm saying, I refer them to a couple of studies. A 2001 survey entitled, 'The intention to hasten death: a survey of attitudes and practices of surgeons in Australia'—a survey of attitudes and practices of practising surgeons at that time in Australia—by Douglas et al found that 36.2 per cent 'reported that, for the purpose of relieving a patient's suffering, they have given drugs in doses that they perceived to be greater than those required to relieve symptoms with the intention of hastening death'. So, in that survey, over a third of surgeons who were surveyed, admitted giving drugs in doses greater than what they perceived to be necessary to relieve the symptoms of suffering, with the intention of hastening the death of their patients.

There have also been other studies. A landmark study conducted in 1997 by Peter Singer and others found that:

Australian law has not prevented doctors from practising euthanasia or making medical end-of-life decisions explicitly intended to hasten the patient's death without the patient's request.

So it's very clear that this is going on in palliative care wards around the country. I'm not going to name the ward or the hospital, but I'm very happy to place on record that, last year, my father was euthanised at his request in a palliative care ward in Tasmania. I'm really pleased, and I thanked the medical professionals profoundly, from the bottom of my heart, for killing my father, because he wanted it, he was lucid, he was rational and it was the right thing to do, based on compassion and humanity.

But this isn't about my father or anyone else's relative. This is about people who are suffering intolerably. During my work on this issue over many years in Tasmania, I came into contact with many outstanding people. I want to place on the record a letter that one of those people, Mr Robert Cordova, wrote to me. He's dead now, but he was a remarkable man—brave, intelligent and dignified and a gifted communicator, despite the fact that MND had entirely removed his ability to communicate verbally. His life ended not long before the debate on my Dying With Dignity Bill in the Tasmanian parliament in 2009. This is a letter Robert wrote to me before he died. He asked me to read it out in 2009, which I did during the debate, and I'm going to read parts of it out today. It's headed 'Australia supports torture'.

We do not see this headline in any of our daily newspapers, yet I'm being tortured under legislation, mandated and enforced by both state and federal Australian governments—simulated drowning, stress positions, humiliations and other indignities.

I have motor neurone disease, a terminally fatal degeneration of nerves and muscle tissue to which the medical profession has surrendered to its paramount entity, death. Nothing can be done to stop the inevitable advance of MND.

The medical community is complicit with the policymakers of torture in not actively working to permit the resolution of our suffering by our voluntary death, and they continue to support our torture by washing their collective hands of us, to let us suffer through the full disease cycle.

The first torture is the indeterminate death sentence. I do not know how long I am to be held in this Guantanamo, and cannot be told. What I do know is that all my voluntary muscles will continue to degrade until I cannot walk, talk, use my arms or hands, swallow and, finally, unable to breathe, I will expire.

The sentence is a humiliation of any measure of my humanity.

That's what current law has subjected people to.

Whilst many people will mount arguments, quite rightly and understandably, that this is a law reform based on the simple human value of compassion, for me it's about that but more than that. It's actually about self-determination and personal autonomy. I say to people in this chamber that, if they believe in the human right to a dignified and peaceful life that's driven by autonomy and informed choice, then it is the right and consistent thing to do to vote for the rights of Australians to choose a peaceful and self-driven death on their own terms. Dying is one of the most personal things that we will ever do in our life. We have a responsibility to allow people to the greatest degree possible to choose the time and the means of their own death.

The laws that I proposed in Tasmania on two separate occasions were very tightly framed and would only have allowed people to choose to access a voluntary assisted dying framework under very constrained circumstances. But we have to be careful, when we are framing such laws, that we do not create so many hoops that people have to jump through that it becomes too difficult or impossible for them to access the framework.

So, even though this legislation is actually not about creating a framework but is simply creating the right to create a framework, I do want to say that, although I proposed laws which created a very stringent framework, on reflection I would have made those frameworks less stringent and potentially allowed access to those schemes for more people than would have been able to access them should those laws have been passed. That is because I ultimately believe in personal autonomy and self-determination.

For those who want to base their arguments on compassion and humanity—and I believe that, at least in strong part, my support for laws to create voluntary-assisted-dying frameworks is informed by those values—I refer them to people like Robert Cordova. I refer them to other people whose family members have held bowls under their mouths in the last days of their life while they vomited faecal matter into those bowls. I refer them to those horrendous deaths where palliative care, despite all of its advances and all of the beautiful and brilliant people who work in the palliative care sector, simply cannot remediate that suffering and that indignity. I urge people to think about those people, many of whom are no longer with us and some of whom will be suffering through those indignities right now as we debate this, before they determine their votes on this legislation.