Medical Services (Dying with Dignity) Bill 2014 a Matter of Conscience

Wednesday 12 November 2014 @ 12.09 p.m. | Legal Research

On 24 June 2014, the Senate referred the Medical Services (Dying with Dignity) Bill 2014, to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee (the SLCALC), for inquiry and report. The SLCALC has now tabled that report with the main headline coming from the report being, as The Guardian reports, that the SLCALC:

". . . has called for a conscience vote on [the] Bill allowing terminally ill people to legally end their lives, but asked that key technical issues with the legislation be clarified".

About the Bill and the Inquiry

The Bill was originally tabled by Green's Senator Richard Di Natale on 24 June 2014 as an exposure draft, described in its long title as:

"a Bill for an Act relating to the provision of medical services to assist terminally ill people to die with dignity"

(see also our previous post: Medical Services (Dying with Dignity) Exposure Draft Bill 2014: Federal Euthanasia Bill).

It was then referred to the SLCALC for inquiry and report. The SLCALC inquiry was tasked to have particular reference to "the rights of terminally ill people to seek assistance in ending their lives" and also to consider "an appropriate framework and safeguards with which to do so".

The original closing date for submissions to the inquiry was 21 August 2014, however; owing to the large number of submissions received, on 22 October 2014, the Senate extended the time for the SLCALC to report until 10 November 2014. So great were the number of submissions that the SLCALC announced on its website that it had decided not to publish all of them, instead deciding to publish: "all submissions from organisations and academics and an equal number of individual submissions both supporting and opposing the Bill . . . " saying also that:

"The individual submissions published are representative of the submissions received".

What the Bill Proposes

The draft Bill is yet another chapter in a long debate over the rights of the dying and concepts such as voluntary euthanasia. The draft Bill proposes to allow terminally ill people over the age of 18 to “die with dignity”, and grant medical professionals who provide the service immunity from prosecution. As a check on the provision of such services, the Bill requires the person asking for the life ending services to be “mentally competent”, to be suffering from a terminal, incurable illness, and to have three doctors, including a psychiatrist, approve their request.

The Guardian reports that the SLCALC, "cited expert advice from the Australian Medical Association (the AMA) and others calling for 'technical issues' in the Bill to be clarified". Issues needing clarification were said to include the meaning of “terminal illness”, a term said to have “no precise definition”, and which as one submission pointed out "could be interpreted to include type-2 diabetes or frailty".

What's Next Might be a Matter of Conscience

The SLCALC Chairman Senator Ian Macdonald is reported as stating that if the Bill was introduced, “party leaders should allow senators a conscience vote . . .” and Senator Di Natale is reported as calling on the Prime Minister, Mr Abbott and the opposition to back a conscience vote.

The Guardian quotes evidence of opinion polling submitted to the SLCALC inquiry as showing that support for "a voluntary assisted dying regime" has in the past decade "wavered" between 70 and 85 percent.

While there has been positive feedback to the draft Bill from the SLCALC which is largely made up of conservative senators indicating a possible change in mood, those supporting the Bill should also recall that similar legislation was narrowly defeated in Tasmania last year (2013) and was briefly permitted as a law of the Northern Territory from July to December 1996 when it was then reversed by Federal Liberal MP Kevin Andrew's (the now Social Welfare Minister's) Federal law which overturned the Northern Territory legislation.

A Defensible Policy

In an interesting article in The Conversation, Sascha Callaghan Lecturer in Health Law & Bioethics at University of Sydney make the following comment:

"To achieve defensible policy, we need to understand what’s really going on when we struggle with legalising assisted suicide. And it is simply this: the decision to die is not an ordinary choice."

Indeed, in its finality, it is a far from ordinary choice which must be got right, for as Ms Callaghan further says:

"We do need to decide which deaths we are prepared to countenance. We may each decide quite differently. But all of us must think long and hard about where and why we draw those lines."

All must think long and hard so that if conscience guides the political decision it is indeed an informed current public conscience that is expressed by our political leaders on our behalf.

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