Page 2878 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 14 September 1994
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good faith and in accordance with this Bill, he or she will not be liable. That has to be a good step. I believe that it will help doctors do what they want to do and that it will also help patients have real rights in this important area.
I believe that the Assembly should support this Bill. I think it is a step forward. However, I do understand the arguments that say, "It is all too hard. It is better just to let things go as they are". If they were working perfectly, I would agree. The fact is that they are not. The fact is that people are being underdosed with pain-killers because of the concern of some doctors in this area. We want to make sure that that does not happen. I certainly want to make sure that that does not happen. I also believe that we must remove that added burden on doctors who are treating the terminally ill, to ensure that the quality of life of those people is considered and that their wishes are adequately carried out. This Bill makes us sure of that.
MR KAINE (10.53): The motion before the Assembly is that we agree in principle with this Bill. I make it quite clear from the outset that I do not agree with this Bill. There are two questions that we should be asking ourselves in discussing such a matter. The first is: Should we be legislating in this field at all? If the answer to that question is yes, we should be asking: Is this Bill an appropriate Bill? I will deal with each of those questions. My considered answer to the first question - whether we should be legislating in this field at all - is, "No, we should not". My answer is based on the fact that there has been no ground swell of public opinion asking for such a Bill.
We should look at the process by which this Bill arrived on the table in the Assembly for discussion today. It started because Mr Moore thought we should have an active euthanasia Bill. That is where it began. There was no ground swell of public opinion for that. There was a very small number of lobbyists who came to see me, as I am sure they came to see everybody else, and pushed their case for active euthanasia. I reject that as a principle. We had a very small minority seeking to have in place a law which would make active euthanasia legal. What did this Assembly do with that? Obviously, there were great reservations about it, because the Assembly referred it to a committee. I note that, significantly, Mr Moore, the proponent of the active euthanasia Bill, became the chairman of that committee. So he had every opportunity to convince - not this whole Assembly, but a small committee - of the rectitude of his position. And what happened? They went through a very extensive public hearing process, and the majority of the evidence given to that committee was opposed to active euthanasia.
If the committee had stopped right there, we would have no Bill in front of us, because the committee would have said, "Mr Moore's initiative is not a goer". But it did not stop there. The committee obviously were not prepared to say, "There is no basis for the Bill put forward by Mr Moore, and it should be rejected". For some reason they said, "What can we salvage out of this?". We have this watered-down document - which does not refer to euthanasia at all, although it purports to support it, in some fashion - called the Medical Treatment Bill. Is that not a nice euphemism? Are we not great in thinking up euphemisms when we are really talking about killing people?
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