Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment and Water (Senate)) Share this | Hansard source

When debate was interrupted before question time today, I was reflecting on the experiences of an advocate for euthanasia in Western Australia, Clive Deverall. He had said that he had been discussing the lack of a compassionate law in that state and how it would force people into taking their own lives in a fairly brutal way. Clive, in fact, was one of those people who ultimately took his own life because of a lack of access in the state of Western Australia to laws similar to those that have now been passed in Victoria.

Before we went to question time, I was speaking of the fact that the Victorian state coroner, John Olle, had described the 240 suicides in the state as those ending their suffering due to an irreversible decline of health. He reported to the committee that where people have essentially been forced to euthanise themselves because of a lack of access to gentle dying, those methods of suicide, because of a lack of access to euthanasia and the prospect of a terrible death, were poisoning, hanging and shooting.

People should not have to suffer. Those terminal patients who are suffering with no hope of relief or return should have compassionate options available to them. Stringent legislation that has been written in consultation with experts and that has strong safeguards that protect patients and health practitioners means that patients have those options.

So the question for the chamber today is indeed about choice. It is about a choice of this chamber to free up the jurisdictions of the ACT and the Northern Territory so they can have their own discussions and their own parliamentary debates about making quality and responsible euthanasia mechanisms available in their states.

This is not a replacement for palliative care. We need to make sure in our nation that we have palliative care options so that those with terminal illnesses can make a choice to die in a way that is acceptable to them.

As I've reflected previously in this debate, we already know that Australians widely support voluntary assisted dying. The 2016 ABC Vote Compass poll demonstrated that over 75 per cent of participants supported assisted dying. Support for this kind of legislation is in fact overwhelming. Newspoll polled on three occasions in recent history—in 2007, 2009 and 2012. Between 80 and 85 per cent of those polled supported euthanasia for those experiencing suffering with no chance of a cure.

I note that views in our community will be diverse. They vary according to cultural and linguistic background and religion, and people have every right to hold those views. But we need, in this place, to remember that people should also have the right to make their own choices about the way they die. Our views should not mean that we stand in the way of others who need to be able to make these choices, and that includes this parliament not standing in the way of the ACT and the Northern Territory and not standing in the way of Australians who have these difficult choices to make.

The alternative is for this chamber and this parliament to have to deliberate on our own medical-care-of-the-dying legislation to apply to the Northern Territory and the ACT, because we can't continue, like we did on marriage equality, to allow our nation to have laws that are so out of step with public opinion. We can't refuse to legislate ourselves at the same time as refusing to allow the Northern Territory and the ACT to legislate as territories in their own right. My preference is very much for the ACT and the Northern Territory to have their own self-determination on these questions.

So I call on the Prime Minister to allow a free vote in the lower house on this question, just as we have been allowed a free vote in this chamber. Ultimately, this debate should not be about our control. It is about putting it in the hands of those who are terminally ill and who choose to end their own life course where they desire to. It is also about the choice of the territories in this nation to have their own conversations with their own citizens about these issues.

My own mother changed her GP when she found out her GP's views on end-of-life choices and found that they were more conservative than her own. The prospect of having a doctor not supportive on these very sensitive issues was concerning to her, particularly as she ages. But here, in this place, we have exactly the same kind of concern: we have a parliament which is allowing legislation to stay on the books that is overwhelmingly out of step with the majority view of Australians. That GP is perfectly entitled to her own view and perfectly entitled within her own medical practice to exclude herself from those decisions, but that doctor should not be entitled to make decisions for all patients, any more than this parliament should be in control of all of the life-ending choices of Australians.

This parliament stood in the way of marriage equality for too long, and we should not let people's choice to use assisted dying be the same. In my own state of Western Australia we're currently having this debate. Victoria has had it, yet Canberra and the territories are precluded from even having their own discussions. In the meantime, this parliament simply wants to preclude them from having those discussions, rather than even substantively discussing the question itself and whether we would be prepared to legislate on these questions for the territories. We're stopping the territories and their communities from having this conversation and making their own decisions. This bill is about giving territorians their voice back and about supporting the end-of-life choices of Australians, and I commend the bill to the Senate.