Uniting Church call for limits on assisted dying

The Uniting Church has called for the axing of a plan to widen eligibility for voluntary assisted dying beyond what is allowed under Victoria’s benchmark euthanasia law.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk says VAD legislation would be brought forward and presented to state parliament next February. Picture: Jono Searle

The church controlling two of Brisbane’s top private hospitals has called for the axing of a plan to widen eligibility for voluntary assisted dying beyond what is allowed under Victoria’s benchmark euthanasia law.

The Uniting Church has told the Queensland Law Reform Commission that a terminally ill person must be within six months of death to qualify for VAD, in line with Victorian practice.

The safeguard has been stripped out of a model bill that was referred to the commission in March by the parliamentary committee that found Queensland should become the third state after Victoria and Western Australia to legislate the right to die.

The Uniting Church is among the organisations and individuals to make written submissions to the QLRC on how the Queensland legislation should be framed.

The new moderator of its Queensland Synod, Andrew Gunton, said he was concerned about “scope creep” on the prototype law in Victoria.

“What worries us is it becoming something without any time frame,” he said. “It could potentially blow out eligibility for assisted dying … quite a way.”

Under a surprise re-election commitment ahead of the return of her Labor government on October 31, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said VAD legislation would be brought forward and presented to state parliament next February, curtailing the QLRC review.

The model bill drafted by former Queensland law reform commissioners Ben White and Lindy Willmott departs from the stipulation in Victoria and WA that a terminally ill person must have less than six months to live – or a year in the case of someone with a neurodegenerative condition – to qualify for assisted dying.

The White-Willmott bill specifies that the medical condition be fatal, incurable, advanced, progressive, causing intolerable and enduring suffering but dispenses with a determination of life expectancy.

In a 2019 interview with The Australian, Professor White said a six or 12 month time frame was arbitrary and should not be written into the law. “There was no reason to say that someone, for example, who was eight months away from their anticipated death and in unbearable pain and suffering, who had an illness that was advanced, incurable and definitely going to kill them, why they should not be able to access assisted dying at eight months instead of, say, four or five months,” he said. “We could not find a justification that was sufficiently defensible to impose an arbitrary time limit.”

Reverend Gunton said the Uniting Church’s hospitals in Queensland – The Wesley Hospital and St Andrew’s War Memorial Hospital in Brisbane, both advanced surgical centres, Buderim Private Hospital on the Sunshine Coast and St Stephen’s Hospital in Hervey Bay – would not offer VAD and seek a right of institutional conscientious objection to the law. This reflected the position of the Catholic Mater group.

The increased majority of Ms Palaszczuk government guarantees the numbers to pass the VAD legislation now being evaluated.