Vikki Campion: NSW euthanasia bill shows governments’ warped priorities

How is it possible that referring to a person as “he” or “she” instead of “they” is now considered cruel, but sending grandma to an early grave is not, Vikki Campion asks.

Calling someone the wrong pronoun now triggers tears, but you will be sneered at if you think killing grandma is cruel.

Missing the non-binary cue and addressing someone who prefers they, them and their as he or she, is insult to the point of discrimination — but ushering in an inconvenient relative to an early grave is not.

Your licence will be cancelled in Western Australia and you’ll be turfed out of your pro-bono legal practice in Sydney because someone’s feelings could be hurt by what you say, but knocking Great Aunt Pat on the head is sympathetic.

Another euthanasia bill has been tabled in NSW Parliament. Picture: iStock

The goose step of the troops of victimhood echoes louder as the NSW Parliament, led by Sydney Mayor Clover Moore’s protege Alex Greenwich, seeks again to introduce yet another euthanasia bill after it failed two years ago, backed by a working group including Nationals MLC Trevor Khan.

While small business has gone out the back door in the mission to protect the vulnerable from illness, others have been devoting time to killing them.

It comes as the Labor Western Australian government, hearing the victimhood march loud and clear, is prioritising new laws to ban “offensive, sexist and demeaning slogans” from vehicles on WA roads, amending the Road Traffic Act 2012 to “allow vehicle licences to be cancelled or refused if vehicles display offensive material”.

A fuel-guzzling SUV unironically sporting a “Can’t eat coal, can’t drink gas” sticker is not what the WA goose-steppers are marching to end.

Meanwhile, the City of Sydney has found Glebe’s Feminist Legal Clinic, a pro-bono service that helps the most vulnerable women, hasn’t met its performance criteria because the Clinic’s “affiliation with women’s sex-based rights movement” has “the potential for generating discrimination and negative attitudes towards the transgender community”, breaching the Anti Discrimination Act.

Euthanasia advocate Dr Philip Nitschke. Picture: Jerad Williams

Suddenly, championing biological women’s rights is considered by the slow march of the state as discrimination against people born male.

Tasmania’s lesbians have just been told they can no longer exclude people with penises from events, as Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Sarah Bolt determined lesbian events that exclude trans-women carry a “significant risk” of breaching equality laws. What about women only attracted to the same sex?

The slip of the slope comes fast and hard.

A few years ago Philip Nitschke was in jail facing arrest for supporting assisted suicide, and if you called a biological man who identified as non-binary or trans a “he” that was simply offensive.

Now not only is it against the law, but your community service which caters to women will be kicked out.

In their bid to find humanity, the goose step has a way of enforcing the inhumane.

When you ask 80-year-olds why they poll in favour of euthanasia, it’s because they do not wish to be a burden on their children into old age.

But what if that is the only thing standing in front of a multimillion-dollar house inheritance?

My friend’s father essentially chose to die recently when treatment for his illness became too much of a burden both on him and his wife. He would rather, he said, die at home than commit her to two hours a day driving to dialysis and then the five hours in the hospital.

He died with a kiss and a smile, high on painkillers, with his wife and daughter by his side.

It was by his own choice and required no edict from the state. If people want to go, the palliative system know how to let that process happen without sanctioning by the state but this means the person who goes has protection from duress.

It is a downward march when the state has authority over who lives and who dies.

In another iteration of the all-powerful state a young woman is prohibited from breastfeeding her child. Who gave the state that power, and why? She gets an hour a week with her daughter and feeds her on Fridays, in secret, hiding from the glare of the caseworker.

In October, the federal parliament will host Raise Our Voice Australia, which has the honourable objective of increasing political literacy of young voters.

However, in its email it aims to “increase the number of young female and non-binary voices leading the conversation in domestic policy, foreign policy, and politics”.

Young men who identify as men need not apply.

An uncreased face in the House of Representatives is usually a sign of Botox and a fabulous skin regimen rather than youth, with our youngest Member of Parliament being the LNP’s Phil Thompson at 33.

All youth should be heard, just as all people, no matter their sexuality, gender or age, deserve safety – rather than the possibility to feel pressured into an early death.

Deny a baby her mother’s milk and you are apparently protecting the child, kill your grandparents because they don’t want to be a burden and you are charitable — but tell a gender-queer person with a penis they can’t come to lesbian singles’ night and you are a bigot.

Stay in lock-step, let the state decide, just as they have that biological men are lesbians, standing up for the legal rights of women is to discriminate against others and there is a permanent solution to the temporary inconvenience of age