That I am personally healthy,not ready to die at this time,is irrelevant. However,I demand my right to make my own decision. I am not telling the Premier – or indeed the state Labor leader,also opposed to the assisted dying bill before Parliament – what they should decide to do when they are my age. That is not my business – as my decision should not be theirs.
However,preventing a law that would allow me to have that freedom is incredible. It is ludicrous that a youngster like Perrottet,39,can assume he knows how it feels to be old.
More importantly,though,I am not alone. I am a member of that growing cohort of The Ancient – 75 to 100 years old. We all share an ever-sharpening perception of death on our journey. This is not necessarily a frightening prospect in itself,but there are terminal pain,isolation,bereavement,lack of control of bodily functions,poverty,all experienced by many of our members in their later years.
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Is palliative care the answer? There is only one person who has the right to make that decision.
There is another fundamental point for our prime legislator to consider:What is the law? Simply put,it is a community sanction to prevent one person harming another. And who is harmed by the decision of another person to end her/his life in a reasonable fashion with family by the bedside?
Euthanasia – like the right-to-wed issue confronting Malcolm Turnbull four years ago – is one of those perennial ethical problems that transcend party politics. So the political answer is usually a conscience vote and the one thing we didn’t vote for in the last election was a candidate’s conscience. The problem then remains:how to gauge the attitude of an electorate on an ethical problem not covered in party politics.