Recommendation paves way for Queensland to become third state to enact euthanasia law

Controversially, an all-party committee recommends mentally ill people be given access to voluntary assisted dying.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. Picture: AAP.

Queensland will become the third state to enact euthanasia law under proposals put to the state Labor government by an all-party parliamentary committee on Tuesday.

Controversially, the long-awaited report recommends that mentally ill people be given access to voluntary assisted dying provided they demonstrate sufficient “decision-making capacity”.

But it departs from the benchmark Victorian law, which came into effect last June, in limiting eligibility for VAD to terminally ill patients with less than six months to live.

The proposed Queensland scheme should not mandate “precise time frames for a person’s anticipated date of death within which voluntary assisted dying may be accessed due to the complex, subjective and unpredictable nature of the prognosis of terminal illness,” the parliament committee found.

While the report recommended that VAD be limited to people with “decision-making capacity”, in line with the Victorian law and provisions in Western Australia yet to go into effect, it said those with a mental health condition should not be excluded if they were otherwise eligible and could demonstrate a decision-making capacity.

Doctors would be given greater freedom to prescribe medications used in VAD than was the case in Victoria, and have the option to administer the lethal dose.

The report reflected the majority view of the parliamentary committee, but some MPs had dissented, Labor chairman Aaron Harper indicated.

Mr Harper, a former ambulance officer, emphasised evidence to the committee that terminally ill people were committing suicide because they could not access help to die.

“I know first-hand the difficulties faced by first responders when attending suicides,” he wrote in a forward to the report. “These are tragic and deeply upsetting situations.

“We receive information that every four days in Queensland, a person suffering a terminal illness takes their own life. This must stop. In my view, suicide should never be the only option for Queenslanders suffering at end of life.”

The committee recommended that Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Labor government adopt draft VAD legislation devised by former state law reform commissioners and academics Lindy Willmott and Ben White.

But if Ms Palaszczuk follows the mechanism used to decriminalise abortion in Queensland, drafting of the VAD law will be referred to the Queensland Law Reform Commission. This would mean a bill would be unlikely to go to the Queensland parliament before the state election in October.

Its passage, however, on a likely conscience vote would be easier than was the case in either Victoria or WA because the state parliament in Queensland has no upper house.

The committee has also urged that a review body similar to the Victorian Voluntary Assisted Dying Review Board to provide oversight of the scheme, a process that may take 18 months.