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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 2 Hansard (26 February) . . Page.. 494 ..

MR STEFANIAK (Minister for Education and Training) (4.39): Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, Mr Moore has certainly run this argument and similar Bills in the past, and I do not think there would be anyone here who would not agree that he does it for what he sees to be the very best of reasons. I think everyone would acknowledge that. This Bill is quite different from the Commonwealth Bill. We debated Mr Andrews's Bill and issues in relation to that prior to Christmas. I think this Assembly was fairly unanimous in terms of the main issue in that Bill. As far as this Assembly was concerned, it was one of the Territory's rights, and the Territory's right is to bring in such laws as it sees fit without the Commonwealth overriding that law. I think that is something that crossed party boundaries and crossed, I suppose, individual boundaries, too, in terms of the substantive issue of whether you support euthanasia or not.

Mr Moore's Bill is different from the Commonwealth Bill. It is properly brought in this Territory and it is, indeed, for us to decide. As I said when I spoke briefly in relation to the question of Mr Andrews's Bill, whilst I did not think that was an appropriate Bill to be brought because of the issue of Territory rights, I indicated then that on this substantive issue of euthanasia, if it were brought to the Assembly - and Mr Moore has done that in his Medical Treatment (Amendment) Bill 1997 - I would be voting against it, and I will.

This is a difficult question. A number of very good points have been made by all sides in this debate. I can certainly see where Mr Moore is coming from, the deep-seated belief he has and the compassion in his views on this issue. Similarly, I can see the deep-seated beliefs and the compassion that people who are very much against what Mr Moore is trying to do also have. I have read with interest a number of letters that have been presented to me, as they always are during this debate, and I will refer to two of them, one on each side of the fence. One relates to a survey of nurses by a postgraduate student in favour of euthanasia, and the other one is from the Catholic Education Commission containing an attachment of a speech on euthanasia by Katrina Lee, part of which I will also refer to.

When Mr Moore brought this in he indicated that he had spoken to a number of people who really were faced with this issue of euthanasia, although he had not seen it first hand. Whilst I suppose I have not seen it first hand, given that I had two very elderly parents, one of whom died only last year and the other some time before that, I suppose it has brought home to me the situation of what if a Bill such as this had been in at the time my father died and my mother died. My father died at the age of 75 in 1986. He had his wits about him. In fact, the day he died he got up from his sick bed - he had had a bad cold - and toddled off, as he always did, to the White Eagle Club, the Polish club. I picked him up after work and told him what a silly old bastard he was as he should not have gone off with a bad cold. My father would always bite at any argument like that, but he was strangely subdued. It concerned me a bit. I went home with him and went back to my house. In the early hours of the morning my mother rang and said he had been taken off to hospital in an ambulance and had died. When I spoke to the hospital they said, "We almost could have saved him, but he would have been a vegetable". If that had happened, I suppose it would have brought into play the very question that Mr Moore is posing. I think I know what my father would have wanted then. He would have wanted, if there was still some chance, to stay alive.

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