Senator Pat Dodson rejects assisted dying

An architect of Indigenous reconciliation, Pat Dodson has called on Aboriginal health providers to boycott emerging voluntary euthanasia schemes or risk destroying the trust of communities.

Aboriginal women Cheryl Bowe (R) and Noeleen Dempsey (L). Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jono Searle

An architect of Indigenous reconciliation, Pat Dodson has called on Aboriginal health providers to boycott emerging voluntary euthanasia schemes or risk destroying the trust of their communities.

Senator Dodson, a former Labor frontbencher and chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, spoke out as Indigenous communities in his home state of Western Australia came to grips with the right to die law that kicked in on July 1.

Voluntary Assisted Dying legislation has also been enacted in South Australia and is in the works in Queensland, jurisdictions similar to WA in having sizeable Indigenous populations clustered around remote townships. That means every state except NSW is set to have passed VAD laws by the end of the year.

Senator Dodson said trust would collapse in any Indigenous medical service or clinic that offered VAD to a dying patient, undercutting the effort to arrest alarming rates of chronic disease in Aboriginal and Islander communities. “People would be very wary of preventive medicine, very wary of presenting to places when they are sick if people know this is a clinic that has assisted someone in dying,” he said. “People would be very suspicious about those places and reluctant to use the other services that they might provide.”

North Queensland state MP Robbie Katter, a vocal critic of VAD, warned on Friday that there had been insufficient consultation with First Nations people over the legislation now before the state parliament. Only 22 of 502 witnesses to a lengthy parliamentary inquiry on end of life care in Queensland were Indigenous, the Katter’s Australian Party leader said.

Standing at his side, Kalkadoon elder Noelene Dempsey echoed concern by Senator Dodson that the emphasis on individual choice in VAD legislation was at odds with Indigenous cultural and social practices.

“A lot of our people go through traditional lore and it won’t be their families or the individuals who make the decision, it will be the lore makers who choose whether those people accept euthanasia or not,” she said.

“We have a different system compared with the non-Indigenous people of this nation.”

Another Aboriginal woman, Cheryl Bowe, said Indigenous communities wanted better palliative care, not VAD, to allow people to die on country.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said extra end of life care funding would be rolled out alongside the assisted dying scheme but was “not physically possible to put in palliative care in every community in Queensland”. The legislation, framed by the state’s law reform commission, is being reviewed by the parliamentary health committee before it returns to the House for debate in September, possibly in amended form.

Townsville-based professor of nursing and Birrigubba South Seas Islands woman, Gracelyn Smallwood, this week told MPs there was a place for VAD despite the reservations from some First Nations people.