Time to Write This Law Community Information Session Transcript

Key Note Transcript Andrew Denton (below) | Click for Transcript of Panel Discussions to come | Sue Shearer ‘Call to Arms’ to come

[in construction] Quick links to: Marshall Perron | Bob Dent – BBC Eyewitness | Andrew’s Father | 

Andrew Denton 

It’s great to be here and extraordinary to be here, really on behalf of Go Gentle because what we’re going to do today, I’m going to take you through some of the story and some of the story of Go Gentle and bring you up to speed on what’s happening around Australia.

And we’re going to have a panel conversation with some people who are going to give you a deeper understanding about what’s at stake and what these laws could be. And then we’re going to hear from, the indefatigable Sue Shearer about how you can get involved.

We expect you to get involved. And that’s why we’re locking the doors right now.

So let’s get started with this man who many of you may recognize your former Chief Minister, Marshall Perron.

And it really is, by any measure, one of the most remarkable stories of political change anywhere in the world because in 1984, sitting by a swimming pool in Phuket in Thailand, this man read a report by a woman called Helga Kosa, a philosopher and bioethicist, which argued for voluntary euthanasia. It said that if you’re at the end of your life, you should have a right to what Marshall calls the keys to the medicine cabinet to end your suffering. And Marshall read this, and he turned to his wife, Cherry, and he said, “I can make this happen. I can win this argument. I’m going to put forward a bill.”

Now, you’ve got to understand that no one anywhere in the world had put forward this legislation.

So here was your Chief Minister deciding to do it here in the Northern Territory. And yes, he did put forward a bill. And, you know, it’s very easy for us to dismiss our politicians as cynical creatures. Well, if you want to talk about an active principle, Marshall’s view on this was that this was not a political issue. This was a human rights issue.

But of course, it was political. He was the Chief Minister. So before the debate started in 1995, he resigned as Chief Minister. So he wouldn’t unfairly influence or be seen to unfairly influence the debate from his position of power. So your parliamentary debate happened on the third reading and passed by just one vote.

And it’s interesting to note that one of those votes was the member for Arnhem, Wes Lanham, who had a 73% Aboriginal constituency in his electorate and was himself Aboriginal. And it is often cited, and I’m sure you’ve heard it cited in this conversation, that Aboriginal Territorians are deeply opposed to this.

Well, there you go. One of those key votes that made this a law was from the member for Arnhem.

So the law passed in on the 1st of July 1996. It became a law.

And I think it’s fair to say at that point all hell broke loose. No, actually, perhaps more correctly, all heaven broke loose because. The church, in particular, the Catholic Church and the many surrogates in the medical profession and their many surrogates in parliaments around Australia went to work. And you’ve had church leaders standing up in front of the media in Darwin saying, this is outrageous.

You had the then head of the AMA standing on the steps of Parliament House, speaking into the cameras of the media and saying to doctors, any doctor that gets involved in this may well be prosecuted and is likely to be prosecuted, warning everybody off.

You had challenges to the Northern Territory Supreme Court, to the Federal Supreme Court, and appeal to the then federal government, all wishing to overturn this law, all rejected until eventually, in August 1996, a little known Liberal federal backbencher called Kevin Andrews put forward [Study on it’s too early to boo. We haven’t got to the booing bit yet] repeal for the euthanasia repeal bill in federal parliament.

In the meantime, this man, Bob Dent, came forward. That’s Bob with his wife, Judy. [points to photograph]. I don’t think Judy’s here this evening, but hopefully she’ll join us tomorrow.

And Bob was a former pilot and, a robust man who had metastatic prostate cancer. He was sixty six, and his life had become absolutely miserable. He had his testicles removed. He was under constant care. He could do nothing for himself. His bones have become so brittle that even a hug threatened to break his ribs. He was on a roller coaster of pain. He was incontinent. He had to sleep on rubber sheets. His life was a constant parade of misery.

And in September 1996, almost a little over thirty years, thirty years ago last week, twenty nine years ago, last week, Bob became the first person in the world to be assisted to die legally. Doctor Philip Nitschke did that. And it was an extraordinary moment because no one had ever done it before. Doctor Nitschke had created a machine, which, a cannula was put into Bob’s arm, and there were a series of commands that only Bob could agree to, which would eventually release, the lethal liquid into his arm and end his life and Bob’s death.

The first man ever in the world to be legally assisted to die was news around the world. And you may, if there’s one podcast you might like to listen to called BBC eyewitness, which records moments in history from around the world from their own archives. You may want to go and listen to the episode about Bob’s death.

It was a huge thing.

Three more people used that rule the ROTI law, the Right to the Terminally Ill Act. It passed the Senate, by only five votes.

I’d like to place on the record, by the way, that one of the MPs in the lower house that spoke against the repeal of the law was our current prime minister. I think that’s worth noting. And the debate itself, set the tone for a lot of what was to come, because the oft used phrase in, response to this law was that it was state sanctioned murder.

And if you go back through the Hansard, I found this quote from the member for Wakefield in South Australia that “part of what gives life its meaning is the grim reality of suffering”. Now, the reason I mention that is because over coming years, attempts to pass a similar law were passed were defeated. This argument, which comes directly from a faith based perspective that’s suffering at the end of life, is something to be valued and is a tribute to God. Not only had a powerful impact in Parliament, but was powerfully reflective of a number of people in our medical profession.

So let’s skip forward.

Exactly three weeks after the repeal of the ROTI law, my dad passed away in Katoomba in New South Wales. He always used to joke he was a pretty funny man. He used to joke that the way he wanted to die was to walk into a swimming pool filled with single malt whiskey and just keep walking. That’s not what happened.

Dad had, amongst other things, congestive heart failure. He was in our local hospital. They did the very best they could. They gave him all the morphine they had to hand. All the stuff. And it didn’t work. And his last three days were profoundly shocking to witness. And his suffering and our suffering remain today. And it was so traumatizing that we never spoke about it as a family, not for many years, because we didn’t know.

Who do you talk to? You’re in a hospital system. They’re doing their best. We assume they’re the experts. We assume that’s how it goes. There’s no one to talk to about it.

So about fifteen years later, when I had moved on from my work in the media, you may remember me as formerly Australia’s top model. I had time and space, and I was challenged to give a talk about a controversial subject. And I just said, I want to talk about euthanasia. And I said, I don’t want to just rock up and give a talk. I’ll do it next to you. And so I set off to find out more about the subject.

Little did I know that ten years later I would be standing here having established a national charity, Go Gentle. After seven gruelling campaigns to see this law happen around Australia.

And I’ll tell you why.

Because as I traveled around for that year, not just overseas but around Australia, talking to people on all sides of this argument, I was very lucky. I got to start my journey at the one and only International Anti Euthanasia Convention ever held in the Southern hemisphere, right here in Adelaide.

And I sat there right through it, spoke to everyone, took notes and that was my guide. Whatever you’re arguing, let’s see what the truth is.

But as I traveled around Australia, what I discovered was these horrendous stories of how people were dying and suffering at the end of their lives.

Inexcusable deaths, deaths happening in hospitals, in palliative care wards, sometimes in people’s homes. What I found was, shockingly, that there were doctors and often senior doctors – and almost always, when you scratch the surface – doctors of faith who were suggesting that these deaths either weren’t happening or if more money was thrown at palliative care, they could be fixed, or that these stories were exaggerated or just sweeping them under the carpet.

I thought then, and I think now, that this was as big a scandal as the child abuse scandals that happened in Australia, and I can assure you, had there been a Royal Commission at any time into what happens to Australians at the end of life, people in this country would have been deeply revulsed and these laws would have been passed a decade ago.

But there never was that Royal Commission.

And what I discovered most of all, and most shockingly of all, and this, by the way, had the biggest impact in parliaments around Australia with the suicides of people who are terminally ill.

I mentioned Marshall before. Marshall for years followed up this. He knew too many stories.

And between us, we did a lot of research.

There’s a thing called the National Coronial Information Service, and it took a lot of digging, but it turned out the statistics were that every week in Australia, two people over the age of 80 were taking their own lives, and more than a quarter of those people were doing so by hanging.

None of those deaths were excusable, and these were people with terminally ill and were suffering. So I realized that there was a very dark thing happening in this country, which was not only not being addressed, It has been denied by people that knew better.

And here’s what I also learned as I travelled around Australia, that the fight to pass these laws was completely uneven since ROTI was overturned.

From when I got involved in… there’d been something like 50 attempts in different parliaments to pass this law. 13 in South Australia alone, none of them had got anywhere.

Most of them hadn’t even got to a second reading. They were just dismissed out of hand. And I realized that’s because it was a totally unfair fight.

On the one hand, fighting for these laws, you had some of the most vulnerable people in Australia who had people who are terminally ill, who had families who were traumatized by what they’ve witnessed. You had remarkable community groups which still exist today.

They’re Dying with Dignity groups, the Northern Territory Voluntary Euthanasia Society, who were doing incredible work but had no resources, very little money, no modern communication skills, no PR firms, none of that stuff.

And against them, you had the biggest and most powerful interest groups in Australia.

You had first and foremost and always and always behind it all, the Catholic Church. You had the Church of England, you had every medical body in Australia from the AMA and palliative care on bar one.

There was one medical body in this country that thought we should have a law for assisted dying.

And guess who that was? The nurses.

Yes.

Because they’re the ones that are hearing the cries for help. And they’re the ones that were listening to and trying to tend to the suffering. They were the ones who, as one senior nurse said to me in New South Wales, will go into the linen closet and just cry because they knew there was nothing they could do.

But everybody else was stacked against.

And so parliamentary, inquiries, whenever this came up, senior doctors and all these medical bodies would step forward and MPs would just go, well, the medical profession doesn’t think this is a good idea, so of course we’re not going to rock the boat.

So that’s why I decided to set up Go Gentle.

I had time, I had connections, I was massively wealthy due to my time at the ABC. I had a stretch limo made out of Lego, let’s be honest.

And I had seen I had spent a year looking at what had been going on. So I had I guess an unparalleled view as to what had worked and what hadn’t worked. And also magnificently, when I went to the Anti-euthanasia convention and I did go there openly, I said, I think there should be a law.

Wonderfully.

They told me all their strategies for how they’d stop these laws in the past.

So I was heavily armed and I launched Go Gentle at the National Press Club in 2016.

And when I did so, I launched this book, The Damage Done, which might be the fastest book ever pulled together in the history of Australian publishing. A small group of us pulled this entire book together from beginning to end in about five weeks, and it’s a collection of testimonies which one journalist described as not unputdownable, but unpickable, because it’s a collection of testimonies from families and doctors and nurses about how people were dying in this country.

And on the back of it is a quote from the Victorian coroner, John Olley, whose evidence to the Victorian Parliament profoundly affected their debate about the suicides of the terminally ill, including one man with prostate cancer who used a nail gun.

And this was John’s quote, There is a cry for help. It may be muted, it may be veiled, but it is there nonetheless. And they all know it, including doctors. They know that this person is screaming for help, but no one is going to answer this call. Not in this society. So they’ve got to die alone.

John Oliver, when he gave his testimony, by the way, remember, this is the state’s coroner wept.

So what did I learn from all those years of campaigning about what works? First of all, and Sue’s already hinted at this. What makes change?

Politicians have principle and health professionals have courage. And institutions like the Nurses Federation stepping up. But what really makes change is the community.

I think it is accurate to say that there has been no greater example of community created laws in contemporary Australian political history than the VAD laws.Over the last seven or eight years, I saw people, some of whom were dying, step forward, bear witness, speak to committees, be heard, be heard, be heard, be heard, be heard. They refused not to be heard.

And it was this overwhelming evidence that made the arguments against start to crumble, because it was clear that there was a significant public health issue in this country.

I learnt that to win this battle, you have to build networks. You have to find all those people that agree with you and start to work together. If one medical organisation is against you, that doesn’t mean all their members are. You have to find the ones who are. You have to make sure that every no is countered by a yes.

So the politicians can no longer go, oh, they all don’t agree. And that takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of legwork. Work. I found that you’ve got to spend time speaking with your opponents and respectfully. And those that doubt or those that are fearful and hear what their doubts and fears are and work out how to address them.

Do your research. Never assume that, particularly an MP, if they oppose this, is doing it reflexively. Sometimes it’s something in their family history. Sometimes it’s something they don’t understand.

The most fruitful conversations I had with the people who strongly disagreed with me, I learned that you had to be realistic about what your goals were.

There was no point arguing in Australia without Judeo Christian, mostly conservative parliaments for a liberal European law which came from a completely different political philosophy. That and that’s why you have to do your research. You have to know what the people are going to vote for this legislation, what it is they’re worried about, what it is they’re prepared to support. If you are putting forward legislation to an MP that they can’t go home and explain to someone in their local pub, then you’ve got a problem, you’ve got a political problem. And I saw this play out in the first campaign we ever did in South Australia, where it failed by one vote at three o’clock in the morning. That’s a whole other story.

And I learned one other thing. And this is the key thing, and this is the thing I most want everyone to take away today. You’ve got to be relentless. This is just a little bit of the media that we garnered in Western Australia over seven or eight months. Your opponents, the Australian Christian lobby. They’ll be relentless. They will be spreading misinformation at every turn, wherever they can. Our internal motto was this no stone unturned, no turn unstoned. Whenever we heard a piece of misinformation, a lie, a piece of bullshit. We were there. There was a local paper, a national newspaper. Parliamentary inquiries. We wrote rebuttals to arguments for sixty or seventy pages long specifically for MPs, so they would be armed. You have to be relentless if you want to get change. So let me skip forward.

I was going to tell you the story of Kerry Robertson, the first person to use this law. The new law in Australia, in Victoria. Well, I will tell you briefly, Kerry was sixty one and light bulb dead. Metastatic cancer started in a breast. Had gone to her brain, to her lungs, to her bones. And her life was miserable like Bob’s. But unlike the controversy and difficulty that surrounded Bob’s death, Kerry was legally assisted to die. Her daughters, Jackie and Nicole were with her. David Bowie was playing in the background. They were stroking her. They were telling her how much they loved her. And they said, as so many others have said, how beautiful it was.

So what’s the situation in Australia today?

Well, as you can see, everywhere in Australia has this law. There’s probably one gap. I’m not quite sure what it is. Maybe you could spot it. The law basically in essence, is for, adults over the age of eighteen who are mentally competent, who are terminally ill, who are suffering unbearably, who, in the opinion of two doctors who assessed them, have an illness or medical condition or disease which is likely to cause their death within six or twelve months. It can vary between states. They have to be citizens of Australia or permanent residents. They must demonstrate their mental competency throughout the application process, which can take three to four weeks and involves multiple assessments and multiple times where you have to assert your competency and that this is your wish, that you are not being coerced. That is essentially the Australian model.

Since 2019, when Kerry Robertson was the first person to use this law roughly 8,000 Australians have applied for assisted dying, but slightly less than half have actually ended up using that medication. Now some die because they come to the process too late. That’s a whole other issue. Some die because they make another choice. They have the medication, but they don’t want to use it. They use palliative care. They just having it. There is palliation the confidence that they can be in control if the worst could happen. What else we’ve learned is that these laws are operating safely. You know, the average age of people using them is 74. Slightly more men than women are. The vast majority of people, 80% are dying of cancer. None of this is a surprise.

This is what happens overseas where these laws pre-existed Australia’s. We know that these laws are working safely and as intended. We know that the things that always raises the arguments against that people will be coerced to die. There is no evidence of that.

What? There is a disturbing amount of evidence of coercion against these laws, often from families, but also from health professionals. The many ways in which people are discouraged or outright stopped from asserting their legal rights. That’s a big challenge that we’re still dealing with. We’ve learned that the argument that this will be bad for palliative care is completely untrue. In fact, the opposite is the case. 80% of people that use VAD are also in palliative care. The palliative care numbers in states where this law has come into existence have gone up, because more people have  become aware of it as an option. We’ve learned that the fear that this would somehow damage the doctor patient relationship is not only untrue, but the exact opposite has happened.

We hear profound, consistent testimonies from families that have been through this of their gratitude to the health professionals who have helped them.

The angels that they are, and equally with a profound and sincere testimonies from health professionals about how helping people in this way has been the most educative and remarkable thing they’ve done in their careers. And for many doctors, it’s changed the way they approach their practice and how they assess patients generally.

And we’ve learnt that to do this, to choose to end your life, to go through the process, to tell yourself, to tell your family, to tell your doctor that this is what I want to do, and then to pick that day, to say goodbye to everything you know and love takes immense courage and determination and that if you hear people talking about safeguards not written into any law, that is the number one safeguard.

This is a hard thing to do.

And the respect I have for the people I’ve spoken to that have gone through it, or the people I know who have gone through it, is immense and I’m speaking personally, but if I was seriously ill and had that medication, I’m not sure that I could do it.

Like most Australians, I want to die being hit by a meteor while having sex. Probably not going to happen.

So here’s an interesting statistic two actually.

First of all, less than a decade from when these laws were first passed, what was a deeply opposed, highly controversial, medical option, deeply opposed within the medical community is now largely mainstream, and there is not a single medical body in this country that opposes VAD. That’s a big shift.

And here’s the second statistic.

Those four people here in the Northern Territory that use that law back in 1996, they were the first four in the world, the only four that had that choice.

Today, in more than 14 countries, 300 million people have that choice, including every Australian other than you.

So what do you do?

Why are we here?

That’s a picture I took of Marshall Perron and his wife, Cherry, with his hotted up car in Queensland a couple of years ago. On the way here this morning, Marshall rang me.

And Marshall is an example of what you need to do to serious an example of what you need to do.

Judi Dent, who for almost thirty years has been heading the Northern Territory Voluntary Euthanasia Society as an example of what we need you to do, which is you need to be organized.

You need to do your research.

You need to be respectful and you need to be relentless if you want this law to happen, and we might talk a little bit about the politics of that in the next little section.

If you want this law to happen, you need to be heard, and you need to get your friends to be heard, and you need to get if you’re next time you see your doctor, say, what do you think about this?

Get your doctor to contact their MP.

I used to work with a man called Neil Lawrence, who sadly died unexpectedly, and Neil Lawrence was the architect of the famous Kevin 07 campaign, so considered one of the best political campaigning minds in the country. And he had a very simple maxim, is what politicians think is what they think everyone else thinks.

And he was right, and he’s still right.

That’s why Linda [Dr Linda Swan] and I are here today.

We want to not just encourage you, as I imagine many of you already do, to support this issue, but you need to get active. The second report will be released, I think, in the next couple of weeks.

There are many ways in which a government can, even if a report recommends a law as the first one did, can make legislation slow down, disappear, get lost in the wheels of of parliamentary process. What will change that is if they start to think that there’s going to be cost and what’s cost, it’s getting there. The people who vote for them to tell them you’re wrong.

We need change. We want change.

And so what I hope will happen here is what happened in other states. There’ll be coalitions going to step forward.

No one individually. There’ll be doctors, there’ll be medical bodies. There’ll be families who are going through hell right now. There’ll be families who’ve been through hell. There’ll be nurses. There’ll be all sorts of people. There may even be, you’d be surprised, some people of religious background, even priests that step forward and say, no, this is a good thing.

You never know who your allies are. So I encourage you to act relentlessly, respectfully, and with careful research.

And let’s go forward and get this done. It’s past time. Well past time.

Reference: Go Gentle Australia (2025, September 30) Time to Write This Law: VAD Choice for the NT. [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/1125422269?fl=pl&fe=sh.