Page 3508 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 12 October 1994
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MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General and Minister for Health) (11.31): Madam Speaker, the Government will not be supporting this amendment. This raises the issue of informed consent, which is an area of law and medical practice which at the moment is a difficult one, I acknowledge, and one that I certainly have in mind. I am discussing with the ACT Community Law Reform Committee its taking this issue on as a major reference. I think it would take some years to look at. The Victorian Government had a look at it a couple of years ago through their Law Reform Commission, and nothing much came of it. The National Health and Medical Research Council has recently put out some papers on informed consent and what it means. That information is very useful but really focuses more on medical procedures than the law.
What we did in the original Bill was, essentially, for the first time, to bring in a legislative requirement for informed consent when withholding treatment that may lead to death. Mr Moore moved a significant amendment which we supported. Perhaps we should have spoken to it, but we were trying to speed the process up. That amendment was to the effect that information should be given not only on alternative forms of treatment that might be available and the consequences of that treatment but also on the consequences of remaining untreated. So, he has said that you have to have informed consent not only about what is available and what that might mean but also about the consequences of the downside to that, of not being treated.
Mr Humphries is now suggesting that you need a second doctor. I do not see why we should legislatively say that you need a second opinion on this, when we do not legislatively say it every day in the oncology department at the hospital when a specialist says, "I believe that you should undergo a course of chemotherapy and I should tell you that the course of chemotherapy may have the following consequences".
Mr Humphries: This is a matter of life and death very often, Terry.
MR CONNOLLY: So is this. I use that example because it is well known that chemotherapy, in the aggressive forms particularly, is used against an aggressive disease which is likely to bring imminent death. It can often have very drastic consequences for the health of the person. But we do not mandate as a matter of law that you need a second doctor there. Mr Humphries used the example of a lawyer with a vested interest in a will. That is saying that there is a conflict of interest; we do that because we cannot necessarily trust a lawyer who may himself stand to be a beneficiary. I can understand that, but I do not think it is appropriate for us to say that we do not trust the doctor.
It is certainly desirable as a matter of practice in the case of chemotherapy, as in the case here, that persons themselves get a second opinion. I can recall a couple of years ago Mr Berry suggesting second opinions in the case of elective surgery, and there were howls from members opposite, particularly Mr Humphries. Second opinions can be a very desirable thing to get, but I do not believe that we should legislatively sanction them when we are already going further into this area than has been done legislatively to date.
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