James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Life must trump all. All in this chamber have come to this debate on different paths. All have family and friends who have fought for life and who have shifted from life to come what may. This bill, Restoring Territory Rights (Assisted Suicide Legislation) Bill 2015, will allow a territory government to introduce a government sanctioned right to death or right to kill. Those most at risk will be now at risk of a sometimes morally nebulous society. I oppose this bill. I oppose euthanasia.

This bill socialises death, not as a last resort, but as a means for society to avoid the dignity of life, often when life is drawing to a close. This is a bill that effectively places the dignity of death ahead of the dignity of life as a means for society to allow, indeed promote, the state-sanctioned killing of the old, the infirm, the unwanted, the dying, the depressed and the forgotten. No human being has the moral authority to decide when another should die.

We are inherently fallible. We make mistakes. We commit monstrous acts in anger. We become overtaken by greed. We oppose the death penalty because we know it is wrong and will always be wrong. To take another human being's life in revenge, even for the most heinous of acts, is wrong. And yet we can somehow rationalise the killing of the sick and the elderly. The fact that such rationalisation is possible says enough about the inescapable weakness of human beings and our inherent unsuitability to make decisions so serious and irreversible as whether someone should live or die.

As a society, we should be asking not how to make it legal for people to be killed but how to build upon the dignity of life for all, dignity for life when it is at its hardest. I will not and cannot support this bill. Life must trump all.