Hansard: Voluntary Euthanasia Bill, Gardiner
Author: admin
Published on: 22-September-2010
HON PHILIP GARDINER: I wish to speak to the Voluntary Euthanasia Bill 2010 sponsored by Hon Robin Chapple. I may be totally out of order, but I do not find this the challenging debate that people have talked about. This debate is really just about real life. We all live it. We all experience it. We all have compassion for the sadness that may come out of it. I do not think that the challenge of this debate is about the issue of death. In fact, some people will say that we are all born to die. This debate is really about what gives us ground to consider that there should be any element of choice in that decision. I also think it is very hard for us in this chamber because when we speak on this particular issue, we are speaking for our electorates. We all know that, based on some form of survey, with some form of question that I must say I have not seen the precise words of, 88 per cent of Western Australians are in favour of voluntary euthanasia.
So, in our electorates, if we are really considering our electorates, there is a move—at least a move—that suggests that voluntary euthanasia has a place. Perhaps what we are doing in arguing our case is saying, “I am representing my own view, and I hope my electorate will follow me.” I also think that what we are talking about here is an issue that goes well beyond money. In my view, the way we die is a human right. It is often frustrated by accidents of life, but it is a human right. It becomes even more of a human right the older we become, because the older we become, the less we are able to influence our lives, and in particular how we die. Once we are infirm and in hospital, there is no way that we can have any other choice but to be at the control of others—unless we have a bill of the kind that we are considering this afternoon. I know people who, when they still had a choice, committed suicide, because, for reasons known to them only, they did not want to thrust themselves upon others by living any longer. These were lovely, decent, contributing people, who, because of some condition of their own, had reached that conclusion. It is with interest that I have discovered, with the help of Hon Michael Mischin, that although we cannot punish people for committing suicide, the law in the statute books, at least from 1913 right up to 1 July 1972, said that people are guilty of a crime if they procure another person to kill him or herself; or counsel another to kill him or herself and thereby induces him to do so; or aids another in killing him or herself. It is interesting, I think, that it took so long to recognise that suicide is not a criminal activity. I will come to that a little later. I also believe that a good deal of fear and uncertainty has guided the framing of this bill, because it is restrictive. I presume that the sponsor has undertaken that in trying to navigate the way to get to a certain stage in our consideration of the relevance of euthanasia in our society.
When I think about it, the most difficult thing for me to come to terms with is people who vexatiously wish to kill their loved one—their parent, grandparent or whoever—for some pecuniary reason or for some other reason that benefits the survivors. That is such an extreme position in itself that I suspect it rarely, if ever, occurs, but we have to guard against it. I can see that is framed deeply into this bill. I admit that Senator Ted Kennedy was not saying this in relation just to, or if ever euthanasia when he said, “Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control.” I think those words helped me decide the relevance of euthanasia to people who are seriously infirmed or whose ability to live in a world has surpassed them and when the pain of doing so, expressed in various ways, is so deep for them that they need euthanasia as one of their options from which to choose. I take Hon Jon Ford’s point that we need more options. At the end of the day, in my view, voluntary euthanasia should be one of those options.
This bill fails in dealing with many, many circumstances in which euthanasia might be appropriate. I have seen serious suffering. I have seen how difficult it is, not for me, because it is always sad for any of us to see someone we love die, no matter when it is, but for the person who is being inflicted with the pain and everything that surrounds that pain. That is the person we need to take into account in considering this issue, because the person, in my view, who is inflicted with this pain is often too good to deserve this pain. I have seen it firsthand. It is worse, in my view, having that than having the relief of that person being able to rise out of that pain and die, to our sadness but to that person’s relief.
I would like to go through some of the rights that have been talked about, not necessarily in this chamber but outside, just to put this euthanasia issue into context, as I see it. The right to life is one of the most relevant points about whether euthanasia has a place in our society. We all believe in the inviolability of life. It is sacrosanct; it is sacred. None of us likes to see people die, in no matter what form, but it happens. What we have to separate out is the sacredness of life, if we like to put it that way, from the biology of life, because the two have different consequences. The spirit, the example of the person who dies, to each of us—we have all experienced it—is so precious and guides us in the way we live our own lives, but the biology is something different. Biology is a tangible thing; it is the real thing; people feel it. Science has gone only so far in being able to control it, but we, in our own lives, if we wish to, can control the way we wish to die to help the biological aspect. The spiritual aspect is going to be there forever in the eyes of those who survive. As for the suffering and the right to life, is it really our right to inflict this kind of suffering on those we love? Is it we who should be making that decision or is it the one who is actually incurring the suffering to whom we should give the right to make that decision? This is where I think we often get sidetracked when we discuss this bill. It is not our view; it is the view of the person involved. It is the person who is suffering to whom we should give the credit and the ability to make the decision of how and when that person might wish to die. There is a sense of fairness about this issue. We talk about the challenging debate here, but the challenging debate of all the child deaths in our Aboriginal communities is to me equally important in this particular issue of the death of people we love when they are in pain and when they are infirmed.
As for the immortality we give to the right to life, there is no right time to die. Would we not all want to just keep on going and to see our children, our grandchildren and then the great-grandchildren, and the football games and the hockey games, and everything else continue on and on and on? Surely the answer is yes. There is no right time to die. Often, unfortunately, it comes about as a result of car accidents or other sudden deaths when suddenly our loved ones are taken away without any warning. But when we are talking about voluntary
euthanasia, we are not quite talking about the suddenness. We have a chance to plan; we have a chance to get used to it, given that it is going to relieve the loved one about whom we are talking. If it is, that is what that person chooses.
Then there is the relevance, in a way, of suicide. I am cautious about raising that, except that there are some interesting aspects, because suicide, again, is a choice that some people exercise to end their lives. Whenever I go to the funeral of someone who has committed suicide, I come out of the funeral saying that if only that person were still here and saw how many friends were there, that person would never have done it. In one service I went to for a suicide—most of us knew, I suppose, that he had taken his own life—the rector said that it was not for us to ponder and wonder about this. He said that it was something between God and Terry—the man’s name. That is a very interesting philosophical way of dealing with someone who has taken his life in a way that is a shock. That is quite dissimilar to what we are considering with voluntary euthanasia. It is a very interesting philosophical perspective, because once I started thinking of it in that way, I found a great relief in the fact that it was really a matter of communication between God and this person to sort that out. I know that brings a religious aspect to that situation, nonetheless it is relevant.
Whose interests are paramount in the right to life? I believe it is the ill or infirmed or those who are concerned about the pain and how they might feel as it gets tougher and tougher towards the end of their lives and the dignity they seek prior to their death. It is not the case for us; we are the survivors, saddened, as always, and with compassion for the way in which the person has suffered, and never with happiness about his or her death. The next right I have on my list is the right of pain. Pain is something that we all bear at some time, and it is also something that we learn about from our parents and their parents, and so on. Hon Sue Ellery talked about pain in her speech, and she mentioned regional people perhaps having a higher tolerance for pain than city people. I learned from the example of my father that he ignored pain always, but maybe that is a country thing, because in the country we are always dealing with death—not human death, but death of animals. Humans are intelligent, and we regard our intelligence as being at a much higher level than that of animals, and the relationships we have with other humans are at a deep and high level. However, members should not believe that we do not have compassion for the animals on our properties. When one realises, after having tried to care for an animal and bring it back to health, that it is not going to survive, one has to make the decision that the animal will have to die. Life and death are part of living in the country, and we often have to make those decisions for our sheep, our cattle or our sheepdogs. In the city, people also have dogs and cats and face the same decisions. Those of us who are dealing with life and death day by day have a slightly different perspective. The right of pain also has an endurance factor. When I think of serious, deep pain, I imagine being at one end of a jungle full of vines, trees and ferns. We have to get to the other side; we do not know how far the other side is, but we have to try to get there. We have to clamber through, and we trip and get cut and so on. That, to my mind, is what pain is—not that I have ever been there, but I suspect that that is what the pain will be like at the end, when we get there.
Another example of the right of pain relates to the fact that dying is part of living. When I question my own views on voluntary euthanasia, I consider that, when parents concede to voluntary euthanasia and decide, in the most harsh terms, to bow out of life, it could be regarded as giving up. Culturally, that is not part of our vernacular; none of us is here to give up on anything. That is an example that can be translated back to the young children who are there with their parents when their grandparents are dying. What impact would
seeing that have on their attitudes to living and the necessity to strive, continue on and battle through? I am not sure that I have resolved my conclusion on that, but that is one of the questions I have about the behavioural effect of voluntary euthanasia, if it is to become possible and practised within our communities.
The third right is the right of choice. The right of choice is really a fundamental right; we seem to allow it economically, but this is about freedom. We have freedom of choice when we go to buy things. Should that not apply when we consider all the contexts of the ways in which we want to die? In my view, we should not restrict that most fundamental of freedoms. How we wish to die is a very fundamental thing, and should that really be restricted? Should we not have a choice about that? In my view, we should have a choice about that. However this is not an either/or thing, because palliative care is also fundamental to how we wish to live and how we wish to be cared for. If people are considering palliative care and voluntary euthanasia as either/or situations, they should not; they are “and” situations. I suspect that people get to a point at which they want to exercise their choice to die only after all the best efforts of palliative care have been applied and are still in serious, insufferable pain and can see no future beyond it. More and more these days we have gene tracking to help identify whether we are prone to particular conditions that will end up causing us to be on the pathway to serious pain and death. Should we not then be allowed to plan in that context? As we understand more about genetics, we will be able to predict more and more what our future will hold, and this takes us back to Ted Kennedy’s statement that the future is not beyond our control. In my view, voluntary euthanasia plays a part in that future.
I now come to the right of doctors. A position statement released by the Australian Medical Association in 2007 recommended that good quality end-of-life care should ensure that the patient is free from unnecessary suffering. We are aware that doctors take suffering into account, and already administer euthanasia in many cases; it has twice occurred in my own family. It is done, in the view of the doctor and of the family, in the best interests of the patient. There are occasions on which we already recognise unnecessary suffering, as we all know; that is what we are talking about. However, good quality end-of-life care should also include treatment that gives respect, dignity and compassion. Again, the doctors’ view is that we should be aware of maintaining respect and compassion for, and the dignity of, patients of the kind we are talking about in the context of voluntary euthanasia.
I will not go into life experiences in any depth, which is the next point I wish to address, apart from to say that doctors are already conducting euthanasia, and they do so in the best interests of their patients and their patients’ futures. I have talked about the right of example in that we need to be thinking of others in terms of the person who is the bearer of pain. I have spoken about the attitude of Australians, especially Western Australians, and their view on the introduction of voluntary euthanasia. Perhaps, when we analyse it more intellectually, if members like to use that term, or more diligently or with greater focus in a chamber such as this, we may see other aspects of what voluntary euthanasia implies for our society. However, it seems that the vast population is sympathetic to some introduction of voluntary euthanasia and I share that sympathy with them. But in the end, it is to each their own; each person will make his or her own choice. That in itself is one of the powerful elements contained in this legislation. [
It is also of interest that the United States populace shows similar support for voluntary euthanasia; in general,84 per cent of males and 64 per cent of females allegedly support it. Of the religious biases, Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, Evangelicals and Catholics oppose voluntary euthanasia; moderate Protestants, Lutherans and Methodists were mixed in their views; and liberal Protestants, the so-called Presbyterians and Episcopalians, were most supportive of voluntary euthanasia. I mention that briefly because it is interesting to see what guides the basis of some people’s interest in this area. African Americans were opposed to voluntary euthanasia. The conclusion that was drawn from the survey was that they opposed it due to their low trust in the medical establishment, maybe ignorantly, but that was the alleged reason for their opposition, whereas European Americans were accepting of voluntary euthanasia. However, among African Americans, the higher the education people had, the stronger the correlation with support for voluntary euthanasia.
I will conclude by going back to Kennedy. He was not a man to articulate his vision; he intuitively and in practice fought for human rights, as we all know from his wonderful history. Kennedy might have spoken about human rights as a promise to belong in dignity in community with others. Fear and uncertainty always have unintended and unplanned consequences and often compromise what we do when we bring changes into the fabric of our society. I think it is that fear and uncertainty about possible unintended consequences that guide a lot of how many of us think when we consider the factors that bring us to a conclusion on this issue. What is more, a lot of that concern arises when that change allows new freedoms, because I believe that is what we are talking about in this place; we are adding a new freedom to our society. Although the concern with a new freedom is that it might be abused or go off the rails, I believe it is most important that we do not allow that concern to stop us taking this most limited risk in allowing voluntary euthanasia. The risks that we fear, I believe, are so low that they might be non-existent, especially when taken into account with the benefits voluntary euthanasia offers the person who requests it. We will all be there as we get older and have less and less control over our lives, and we will get to the point at which we have no control, even if we want to euthanase the pain; therefore, we should all reflect again on the meaning of Kennedy’s words that our future is beyond our vision, but not beyond our control. Therefore, I believe those of us who vote yes to the Voluntary Euthanasia Bill are engaging with those who wish to have options and the freedom of choice in such a crucial area, if they are in a position to have voluntary euthanasia, of when and how to conclude their biological life.
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