Page 831 - Week 03 - Thursday, 14 April 1994
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MRS CARNELL (Leader of the Opposition) (11.33): It is unfortunate that we have had our attention taken away from a very good report by what is a fairly political preface. The report process, as Mr Moore said, was very open, and very appropriately so on what is a very difficult issue. It is an issue on which the Liberal Party, as I am sure everybody knows, has a conscience vote. From my perspective, I came to the committee with an absolutely clean sheet. However, I think the following principles guided me, and I suspect other members of the committee, in our deliberations on that Bill.
Like many others, I strongly support the right of any terminally ill person to die with as much dignity and as little suffering as possible. A patient should have the right to allow his or her life to end naturally and without pain. That is something the committee spoke about at length. Equally, if a person is faced with a terminal condition and does not want medical intervention, he or she should be able to refuse it. Again, that is an issue the committee totally supported.
I personally oppose any legislation that might require a doctor or a nurse to deliberately end the life of a patient. Such a requirement would put a medical practitioner, or for that matter anybody else involved in medicine, in a totally impossible situation. One of the most interesting parts of the public hearings was listening to people involved in looking after patients who are terminally ill talk about their relationship with those patients. Many of the nurses particularly, and the medical practitioners as well, made the point that for them to have their relationship with that patient clouded by the view that they could quite deliberately end that patient's life - at that patient's request, of course - would make their position as a carer in the medical sense very difficult. Many of them commented that because they had been trained to save life, because they had been trained to prolong life at maximum quality for as long as possible, the proposed legislation would cause them a lot of problems in terms of ethics.
I think one of the things we all came to grips with - certainly I did - was recognising that society has become increasingly subject to litigation and that some form of legislation is required to support and clarify the principles underpinning accepted medical practice in this matter, consistent with accepted and current community standards of ethics and morality. One of the issues we had to come to grips with was whether there was a need for any legislation at all. Many of the medical practitioners who appeared before the committee made the point that there were some problems in this area right now. Although it is their job, and something they do every day of the week, to give adequate pain relief to make a patient's final weeks, final hours even, of life more comfortable, the issue of whether the pain relief caused death or the condition itself caused death becomes a difficulty in litigation terms in the current legal climate.
The doctors, and nurses as well, commented that clarification in this area was something they would welcome. We know that other States have taken that view as well, and it is something I support in terms of the Bill that has been put forward today. It does clarify the position for the patient and for the doctor and for the medical system generally. That is why this Bill is potentially a very important addition to health care in the ACT.
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