2017-11-01
Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) — It is with a great sense of responsibility that I contribute to the debate on the Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill 2017 this evening. This is one of the most important bills that has come before the Parliament of Victoria and one that has attracted amongst the most community interest as well, which is to be expected. As has been shown over the years, the Victorian community is overwhelmingly in favour of voluntary assisted dying with appropriate checks and balances. I believe this bill delivers on what the community supports.
This bill is the result of the vision, hard work and perseverance of many people over many years, both in the Parliament and in the community. I appreciate and I thank everyone, whether in support of the bill or not, who has taken the time to call my office or to write an email or a letter to me.
The vast majority of callers have been courteous, and I thank them for that. A small number of callers to my office have been unpleasant or abusive to my staff, and that is totally unacceptable, however strongly they feel. I have read a great many but not every one of the emails I have received and have responded to as many as possible, concentrating on those from Southern Metropolitan Region. I thank everyone who has made their views known to me — members of the public, member of the health profession, doctors, nurses et cetera. I thank my staff for assisting in responding to people who have contacted us with courtesy and respect.
I want to acknowledge the tireless work of Dying with Dignity Victoria, Andrew Denton and Go Gentle Australia, who have campaigned so strongly and respectfully for this legislation.
I would like to thank my colleague Colleen Hartland for introducing the Medical Treatment (Physician Assisted Dying) Bill 2008 to this Parliament in June 2008. I was very proud to stand with her, as I know Greg Barber was too. The introduction of the Medical Treatment (Physician Assisted Dying) Bill has in no small part contributed to where we are now. As Colleen has said there have been more than 30 attempts to legalise assisted dying around Australia, and it has overwhelmingly been the Greens who have attempted to do so.
The report of the inquiry into end-of-life choices by the Legislative Council's Legal and Social Issues Committee is a seminal report in Victoria, Australia and internationally. I thank the members of the committee and its secretariat and the people who made submissions and presented at hearings. I know that at times the hearings and the evidence took its toll on members and staff. I commend and deeply thank them for their commitment and dedication to the important work they were tasked with. I also appreciate the work of the Ministerial Advisory Panel on Voluntary Assisted Dying.
I would like to acknowledge and thank the government for following through and introducing this legislation, in particular Minister for Health Jill Hennessy and her staff, for the enormous amount of work they did in bringing this bill into the Parliament. I also acknowledge the work of Fiona Patten on this issue, and I thank my colleague Nina Springle for her comprehensive, considered and compassionate contribution to this debate as lead speaker for the Greens. Nina outlined in detail the technical aspects of the bill, and so I will not be repeating those.
I have thought about voluntary assisted dying for many years — long before the Northern Territory legislation was introduced or Ms Hartland's bill was introduced here, and I have thought about it very deeply. Over the years, the more I have read and thought about it, the more I have come to see the absolute and pressing need to assist people who are experiencing terrible suffering due to the ravages and cruelty of some diseases and the inability of clinical medicines, pain relief medicines and palliative care to alleviate that suffering.
We have all read harrowing accounts from constituents who have watched their loved ones die in agony and without relief. If we can prevent this, we should and we must. This bill is about offering hope and comfort to those people within a legal framework. It is voluntary. The person who is affected by or is facing terrible suffering is the person who makes the decision. I appreciate the level of respect that has characterised the debate on this legislation overall, but I have been concerned at some claims that have been made regarding the non-voluntary taking of lives. That is not possible under the legislation.
In the course of the debate in here and the other place, some people have spoken about the deaths of people close to them. Like most other MPs, I have lost people close to me from terminal illnesses and have tried to support them as best I could as first their strength and then their lives left them. It is so difficult to watch a person you love, whether a family member or a dear friend, decline before your eyes. You feel so helpless.
My first year in this Parliament was a mixture of excitement and pride at being one of the first Greens elected to the Victorian Parliament and throwing myself into the work. At the same time I was watching the declining health of my father. On the very last day of Parliament, 6 December 2007, my sister called and said I needed to get to the aged-care facility where my father was then living.
I went straight there and my father died at 11.45 that night. The staff at Villa Maria, Prahran, looked after my father extremely well, and I thank them for it once again, as I have done before.
Throughout 2014 I watched the decline of my dear friend Lynn, whom I met in prep grade. Over more than 50 years of friendship we had 'been through everything', as the saying goes. My friends and I did all we could to support her in her courageous and defiant battle against the ravages of the terrible disease of melanoma. I pay tribute to her courage and her determination. The staff at Cabrini Hospital, the Alfred hospital and especially Caulfield Hospital Rehabilitation C looked after her as best they could, but she lost her battle in January 2015. I do not wish to go into further detail about those experiences, only to say, as others who have spoken about similar personal experiences have, that it is confronting and heartbreaking, and treatment is rarely perfect.
One of the most salient points raised by the parliamentary inquiry was the evidence from the Coroners Court that some Victorians — one a week — are ending their lives in dreadful ways and are dying alone and in pain. Many of those are frail, elderly and vulnerable people. This is not tolerable. For me, this is one of the key reasons I am supporting this bill. When I was 20 years old, a friend of my mother's who had pancreatic cancer, a disease that is notorious for the terrible pain it inflicts on people, shot himself. His partner found him. As my mother said, it was a terrible thing for him to have to do, but he was driven to it due to the absolute agony he was in. This had a profound effect on me, and I have always thought that there must be a better way.
For those who have said they do not support the bill, I ask them to think about the effect of denying people who are suffering terribly the choice to relieve that suffering in a non-violent way that is protected by legislation. Assisted dying will be voluntary. Those who are opposed to it need not avail themselves of it, but they should not deny the option to others who, due to their terrible circumstances, need and want to end their suffering. As the evidence of the parliamentary inquiry and from around the world has shown, the availability of voluntary assisted dying in and of itself gives hope and courage to people, and many who have the option to use it do not go on to do so.
I agree with those who say we need better palliative care. We do; not only for those in hospices and palliative care facilities, but also those in aged-care facilities and at home. However, for some people, even with the best palliative care, their terrible suffering cannot be relieved. We can and must do both. A letter I received just today from a person in my electorate described this in terrible detail. She talked about her father, who was nearing the end of a terrible disease and was unable to find any pain relief from the morphine that was offered in the palliative care facility where he was. He was told in fact that the pain which was affecting the nerves in parts of his body could not be relieved by morphine and there was no drug able to relieve that pain. Her father went on to suffer for many more days, with no pain relief. We have all heard many similar stories, but this one arrived just today from a person in my electorate, so I thought I would refer to it.
I believe we have an important opportunity now to make a difference to the lives of people, to prevent terrible suffering and to allow people to die gently and with dignity. The majority of Victorians support voluntary assisted dying, and so we should take the opportunity we have before us now to support this legislation on behalf of the people of Victoria.