Western Australia Crosses the Threshold

Allowing Doctors to Kill Patients - Or Help Patients To Kill Themselves. Last December 2019 the Western Australian (WA) parliament voted for a euthanasia bill which legalises state sanctioned extra judicial executions with doctors as the executioners.

Last December 2019 the Western Australian (WA) parliament voted for a euthanasia bill which legalises state sanctioned extra judicial executions with doctors as the executioners.

Eugene Ahern

In Australia we have outlawed capital punishment. Now - with barely a whimper - two parliaments, first Victoria and now Western Australia have passed bills which legalise executions done without judicial process.

All that is required for patients to be executed by doctors is for a small amount of paperwork to be completed and rubber stamped - not by judges, but by bureaucrats who are chosen because they approve of these executions. The true nature of what is being legalised by the WA bill - like the Victorian bill - is hidden behind a deceitful euphemism with the title "Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2019."

What nonsense!

To give patients lethal poisons to kill them is simply killing, not assisted dying.

Those opposed to this dreadful bill put up a long and valiant fight to stop it. Theirs was an almost impossible task because of the lies of the euthanasia brigades led by Premier Mark McGowan who shouted down opponents of the bill pushed by his Labor government accusing them of 'scaremongering'.

Mr McGowan dismissed the objections of the opponents of legalising executions as "ridiculous." He trivialised a most serious legislative action revealing his ignorance of the grave concerns raised against such a step by the former Prime Minister Paul Keating.

He and his killing cohort completely failed to argue a rational case for such a momentous step as legalising the direct execution of patients. Reading their speeches shows that they were high on distorted emotion and completely lacking in an ethical or philosophical case for their bill.
The WA euthanasia bill is wrong in principle! No one should be executed. Full stop! "We don't kill people" as the great American jurist John Noonan never tired of saying. Now they will kill people in WA.

Having legalised killing and doctor prescribed assisted suicides, the euthanasia brigades try to sanitize their evils by euphemisms such as "voluntary assisted dying" and by supposed "safeguards' which are as porous as a gully trap.

Two fierce opponents of the bill were Hon Nick Goiran MLC and former Labor MP Tim Hammond who fought tirelessly first to defeat the bill, and when that failed, to push amendments to tighten the bill. This WA bill is more permissive than the dreadful Victorian bill with clauses opening the floodgates to wrongful death.

In WA doctors can push euthanasia - being allowed to begin conversations with patients about the options to choose death. This is especially dangerous when doctors are simply ignorant of advances in palliative care and the positive management of terminally ill patients.

This provision itself opens a Pandora's box in WA. Doctors there will be free to push euthanasia on vulnerable patients.

Unlike in Victoria, patients there will not be required to be assessed by a specialist in the field of their supposed illness. The bill's critics warned that GPs being non-specialists, are in danger of mistaken diagnosis. Apart from wrongful diagnosis these non-specialist GPs may very often give false or wrong prognoses for patients who are declared to be terminally ill when they are not. Then there is the prospect that the GPs will get their assessment of a patient's life expectancy quite wrong and tell a patient he or she has only six months to live when in reality the patient's life expectancy may be much longer - even years.

We are dealing with the life and possible death of a person. This is a serious matter for the patients and their families. Such life and death decisions should never be made. That much is certain. However, it is even worse when the decisions are left in the hands of doctors without specialist expertise to sit in judgement over the lives of patients.

Former Labor MP Tim Hammond who was an outspoken opponent of the WA euthanasia bill injected some moral sanity into the debate: "[If] we get it wrong in relation to diagnosis, what number [of wrongful deaths] is acceptable?"

The answer of course is a big zero. We make huge efforts to save the life of one person whose life is valued. Now this bill is judging some people as "better off dead.

This bill not only accepts this classification but it then proceeds to lay down the road to death either by direct executions by doctors or by doctor prescribed assisted suicides.

The life of not a single person should be at risk or be taken. Having said that there is a grave danger that patients with mental illness will be at risk. The Victorian Act advises doctors to refer patients to a psychiatrist if the patients have a mental illness that affects their decision-making capacity to choose life or death by euthanasia. The WA bill has no such provision. Suicide prevention advocates and form SANE Australia Director Michael Perrott slammed this omission which further trivialises human lives. "We need expertly trained specialists to assist patient who are mentally unwell." Mr Perrott argued.

Critics of the bill have pointed to the undue influence doctors have under the bill which allows them to introduce the subject of euthanasia to patients as mentioned above. Related to this are the life ending dangers which the bill exposes the larger indigenous population living in remote areas to.

These people whose lives are precious have almost no access to allied health professionals where they live. Furthermore, palliative care is non-existent in remote indigenous communities. This leaves such people at the mercy of "Dr. Strangeloves" who want to tout euthanasia especially because they judge those patients as 'better off dead".

Another sinister dimension of the bill attacked by its critics is that without the spectrum of allied health services and in the absence of palliative care, the families can put pressure on the patient to choose euthanasia and then pressure the doctors to set the euthanasia process in motion.
The bill is a recipe for disastrous deaths.

The tireless fighter against the bill Hon Nick Goiran MLC took up this matter in his second reading speech. He said "If psychological and emotional elder abuse is prevalent in Western Australia, how long is it for a person to be steered towards a voluntary assisted dying decision in circumstances of psychological and elder abuse?"

Hon Nick Goiran MLC highlighted the vacuous nature of the supposed safeguards in the bill. He pointed to how a person determined to die by euthanasia can just go on knocking on doctors' doors until he finds a doctor who will give the green light to the patient to go down the euthanasia track.
The final vote for the bill was 24 in favour to 11 against in the Legislative Council (VOLUNTARY ASSISTED DYING BILL 2019 p31). One MP Hon Adele Farina MLC voted for the bill at the second reading and then changed to vote against the bill at the third reading.

Despite pressure on her from her Labor government she stood up against the bill. In her speech Adele Farina highlighted seven major objections, the last being that because there is no supervision a patient could be virtually forced to take the lethal poison when they may have changed their mind. (VOLUNTARY ASSISTED DYING BILL 2019 p24)

Hon Nick Goiran MLC did the 'hard yards" to get some improvements to the bill. He moved a massive 357 amendments and succeeded in getting 25 of them passed. Perhaps his most significant amendment which was passed was to ban healthcare workers, other than a doctor from initiating a discussion of euthanasia or assisted suicide during a medical consultation.

At the end of his tireless battle Hon Nick Goiran MLC finished on a positive note, pointing to palliative care. As he said "There is a safe approach to end-of-life choices namely palliative care." The WA bill will come into force in mid-2021 when the executions will roll on like a massive snowball - with the numbers relentlessly growing.