Opinion: Qld VAD laws may pressure elderly into suicide

Queensland’s voluntary assisted dying laws could inflict more harm on society than any other legislation, writes Des Houghton. VOTE IN OUR POLL

Labor is cruising to shameful victory in its quest to legalise assisted suicide – thanks to support from the LNP.

I’m told up to nine “progressive” LNP members will vote with the ALP to legalise the “gravely evil act” of mercy killing.

I fear Queensland’s voluntary assisted dying laws have the capacity to inflict more harm on society than any other piece of legislation ever presented to Parliament.

LNP members will come to regret sitting on the fence and allowing themselves to be wedged by Labor. Their support for Labor is already causing divisions within the LNP parliamentary wing. Labor MPs are delighted.

My “evil act” words were borrowed from David van Gend, a Toowoomba doctor with wide experience in palliative care and a university lecturer on the treatments offered.

Van Gend ignited this week’s parliamentary inquiry with a powerful condemnation of mercy killing. “Euthanasia will shatter the very cornerstone of law, by allowing intentional killing,’’ he said.

“It will corrupt the role of doctors by making us bringers of death.

“It will demoralise palliative care, as we have seen overseas, and, worst, it will usher in a new, insidious oppression of the most vulnerable who will feel this not as a ‘right to die’ but more as a ‘duty to die’.

“As the House of Lords put it, ‘vulnerable people – the elderly, lonely, sick, or distressed – would feel pressure, whether real or imagined, to request early death’.

“Even Paul Keating said, ‘It is fatuous to assert that patients will not feel under pressure to nominate themselves for termination.’ ”

Pro-life campaigner David van Gend

Van Gend said it would be a gravely evil act to coerce doctors and nurses who opposed euthanasia to collaborate with intentional killing.

I was glad to see the sham voluntary assisted dying laws championed by Annastacia Palaszczuk exposed by The Courier-Mail’s Jessica Marszalek when she reported the failures to meaningful palliative care throughout Queensland.

“Dying alone and in pain” was a compelling set of stories of government neglect of those in the community too old and too ill to raise a voice.

As Marszalek pointed out, the new laws championed by Annastacia Palaszczuk came with a pledge that “every person approaching end of life should be provided with high quality care and treatment including palliative care, to minimise the person’s suffering and maximise the person’s quality of life’’. It’s a hollow pledge.

It’s far worse in north Queensland, where there was a 70 per cent shortfall in the number of palliative care specialists needed, Katter’s Australian Party leader, Robbie Katter, told the inquiry.

“(This) completely undermines claims that proposed euthanasia laws are to provide dignity in death to those who are suffering,” he said.

Katter said it “painted a devastating picture of the state of Queensland’s health system”.

I was happy to see the Nurses’ Professional Association of Queensland strenuously oppose the new laws. Here I declare I sometimes work for the NPAQ in my role as a media consultant, but I did not have any input into their submission. The NPAQ warned VAD would “fundamentally contradict the right to life”.

NPAQ said VAD would expose more than 72,000 Queensland nurses to great physical and mental harm.

It points to US examples where nurses have been attacked and abused by family members coming to “rescue” elderly loved ones who opted for assisted suicide.

The NPAQ offers a real point of difference with the Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union, which backs assisted suicide laws.

To me, the euthanasia push is sinister, legally fraught, unworkable, problematical, and unnecessary.

It will encourage suicide with devastating effects on youth. This was a point well made by Teeshan Johnson from Cherish Life in evidence this week to the parliamentary inquiry. Euthanasia “normalised” suicide, she said, and rates of suicide had jumped in Victoria, the Netherlands and Oregon in the US after mercy killing was legalised.

She said it was “scary” to think what would happen in Queensland.

And the VAD killing machine will soon be rolling through aged care homes, even those run by faith-based groups who oppose assisted suicide.

Johnson said it was deeply distressing that the Bill would allow an outside doctor to come on to the premises to kill a fellow resident.

She said the Bill was dangerous and unfairly elevated the rights of assisted suicide seekers above the rights of fellow residents, doctors, and institutions ethically opposed to mercy killing.

Palaszczuk’s VAD laws will force faith-based providers to betray their mission.

Des Houghton is an independent media consultant and a former editor of The Courier-Mail, Sunday Mail and Sunday Sun