Queensland assisted dying laws undermine healthcare ethos

Desperate to catch up with Victoria and WA on their mess of euthanasia laws, Queensland is in a class of its own for outrageousness.

The Queensland government apparently has decided the medical and ethical expertise of Catholic health institutions, informed by the fundamental ethical precepts of the religious institutions that invented the modern hospital and hospice, should be ignored.

Queensland – beautiful one day, crazy the next. The Palaszczuk government’s latest foray into “socially progressive” euthanasia laws looks like cementing that dubious reputation. Desperate to catch up with Victoria and Western Australia on their mess of euthanasia legislation, it is in a class of its own for outrageousness.

In a powerful speech, Queensland opposition education and the arts spokesman Christian Rowan stressed there were ethical, medical and professionally unacceptable provisions in these laws, which grant access to institutions by practitioners who have no admitting rights or accreditation and which will affect any facility, public, private, Catholic or secular. “This imposes clinical governance risks with respect to various state and federal legislation, as well as breaching the healthcare standards of the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care,” he said.

Queensland’s voluntary assisted dying legislation allows a doctor or even a nurse to walk into a hospital, nursing home or hospice, ignore the treating doctors and administer a lethal injection whether the patient has any relationship to that person or not.

Naturally, a Catholic hospital will not allow this to happen because it would implicate the staff in a deliberate killing and undermine its ethical basis. However, if the patient can be moved safely they would be prepared to move the patient to somewhere outside the hospital. But if the patient cannot be safely moved the legislation also allows an outside euthanasia practitioner to overrule the treating doctors to have the patient moved or, worse, simply to march into the hospital and do the death-delivering deed.

The ramifications of this are what puts this legislation into the unique class of government by fiat of the foolish. All the amendments that would have ameliorated any standoff between practitioners of VAD and Catholic hospitals and hospices have been rejected.

Consequently it seems clear that the protocols governing these situations will not be the result of measured discussion and compromise but dictated to the institutions from the government.

This government apparently has decided the medical and ethical expertise of Catholic health institutions, informed by the fundamental ethical precepts of the religious institutions that invented the modern hospital and hospice, should be ignored.

It is worth noting that until recently the protocols governing end-of-life issues in Catholic institutions were perfectly in harmony with the general ethical principles accepted by society as a whole. The great trick in the newspeak of the VAD movement is in the word assisted. In fact Catholic palliative care is all about assistance because being assisted to die is part of a complex and difficult obligation for Catholic health practitioners. It is not a case of just giving someone a lethal dose.

Catholic hospitals and hospices do not keep people alive unnecessarily. Although there are strict protocols for their administration, narcotics are usually used to ameliorate pain and help people to die.

It is the Queensland government that is going out on a limb here, as have the Victorian and WA governments, although South Australia has recognised institutional conscientious objection. So why is it doing this, especially since a quarter of Queensland’s hospitals and aged-care facilities and its few hospices are Catholic institutions, and there is a dearth of palliative care in the state? Also, one of Brisbane’s big public hospitals, the Mater, is a Catholic hospital. It seems like a crazy attempt to impose ideology over a significant part of its health system.

The Catholic pro-life ethos is the most powerful position that challenges the progressive Palaszczuk VAD project. Annastacia Palaszczuk knows she can attack smaller private institutions, but the big public institutions such as the Mater are a different matter.

Whether you think euthanasia is acceptable or not, to impose on an institution, a community of people with a widely accepted ethical framework, something that is anathema to its foundational ethical base is more than crazy – it is morally reprehensible.

This is why Catholic Healthcare wanted an institutional right of conscientious objection to this practice.

Trying to undermine the underlying Christian ethos of healthcare is something that has been happening for some time under the aegis of progressive ideology across the Western world. The message is you must allow VAD because you get money from the state.

What is more, in Queensland the legislation is designed to encourage VAD because it also mandates that doctors can initiate discussion of VAD. Even in Victoria doctors are not allowed to initiate discussion on VAD with vulnerable patients.

It is not hard to see where this misnamed bit of progressive ideology is going. It is going to the heart of all Catholic institutions, eventually even great institutes such as St Vincent’s in Sydney.

These hospitals are too much a vital part of the health system to be in any danger of having their doors close. However, the smaller private institutions are in danger.

What is more, the Mater in Brisbane and St Vincent’s are public hospitals, and a fundamental part of the state’s health system, but it won’t be long before the secular apparatus starts to put pressure on them. It is time the people who run the powerful institutions start being proactive in defending the ethos that was their foundation because there are committed secularists under the ideological banner of progressivism who are desperate to defeat that ethos. The useful idiots across this country are helping them.