The Northern Territory Parliament last night passed voluntary assisted dying laws following debate over a gag clause barring doctors from raising end-of-life options with patients. Source: Yahoo News.
The Rights of the Terminally Ill bill passed on a conscience vote with the gag intact.
The territory became the first Australian jurisdiction to make voluntary euthanasia legal in 1995, but the laws were overturned in 1997 by the federal government under John Howard.
All six states and the ACT have since passed their own laws allowing it.
The federal veto was only lifted in 2022, restoring the NT’s right to make its own assisted dying laws.
The NT bill requires that only people predicted by doctors to have 12 months or less to live would have access to assisted dying.
In the NT Parliament yesterday government backbencher Tanzil Rahman spoke against the gag clause that would bar healthcare professionals from initiating conversations about end-of-life options with patients.
Opposition Leader Selina Uibo also argued against residents of aged care institutions being denied information, saying they must be allowed to make informed choices about end-of-life options.
NT Attorney-General Marie-Clare Boothby defended the gag on doctors, saying it was to safeguard terminally ill and often vulnerable people from being coerced into ending their lives.
“This safeguard is not to protect the doctor but to protect the patient,” she said under detailed questioning.
The point was to provide safeguards to ensure end-of-life decisions were patient-led and “genuinely voluntary”.
Despite the opposition to the gag clause, moves to remove it from the bill were defeated on the floor of the house. Only South Australia has a similar gag on doctors.
Bids to quash the 12-month medical prognosis provision on the basis it involved unreliable predictions by doctors and was unworkable were also defeated.
NT Health would have 18 months to introduce the program and a three-year review would be carried out.
FULL STORY
Hold-out territory passes voluntary assisted dying law (By Lloyd Jones, AAP via Yahoo News)
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