Dr. Nitschke's 5 minute right of reply
"It's good to get a right of reply. Sometimes in debates you hear statements made and you think that they're not correct, and you're never quite sure, and sometimes you get statements which you know are just straight, absolutely incorrect, and the right of reply gives you a chance to refute some of them. We've heard some of them today. Before I start, the reference to the fact that I would break the law, of course, to break an unjust law is an imperative to comply with. You've heard this quote before, I'm sure. To accept is to comply and we must break unjust laws otherwise we would simply stay unchanged.
As the judge who railed at Dr. Kevorkian in the US said to him 'You sir, have flouted the rule of law', this was as she was about to sentence him to 10 years prison for helping a dying person to die. 'You sir, flouted the rule of law, it is the rule of law that made this nation, [that is the US], great'.
And a commentator in the New York Times the next day said, 'the judge, Judge Jessica, seems to have forgotten that it was people who broke the law that got her the vote. Leave alone god sitting on the bench of the US Supreme Court. And so one has to break laws.
Now look at some of these other statements that have been made. We have heard today that there is no or was no effective palliative care in the Northern Territory. I resent that. I've been a practising doctor in the Northern Territory. I know about the development of palliative care. I know what it can achieve and I know that it's a necessary skill.
It was a small service because it's a small place, but to simply sit here and assert that Bob Dent didn't get palliative care is to simply misunderstand what was going on with the four patients who made use of that piece of legislation. Palliative care was available in the Northern Territory, people accepted it for what it could do, but as Bob Dent said, lying on a rubber sheet, asking your wife to clean up after you as he died from his prostate cancer, with the best that palliative care could offer.
Of course, there's always experts around after the event who said we should have tried this, or we should have tried that but I tell you, the palliative care experts in the Northern Territory were annoyed by that comment. And this idea that there is all these people in areas where legislation has become possible, we've got the state of Oregon, the country of Holland, the country of Belgium , that there are all these people receiving unwarranted, uninvited, unasked for lethal injections, doesn't bear too close scrutiny either.
There's a lot of people who die, receiving medical treatment that ends life without their explicit request. It happens in Holland, and it happens in Australia. The only survey that's been done, and it's a kind of hard survey to do but the work done in Australia shows that the rate in Australia is very similar to the rate in Holland.
It's nothing to do with voluntary euthanasia legislation, an awful lot to say about the way that modern medical practise is functioning, frankly. And the idea was then suggested that the elderly are frightened. You hear it all the time: these myths which are repeated and repeated in audiences such as this and they take on the certainty of fact.
One that you may have heard, is that the elderly are too frightened in Holland to go into a nursing home because someone will come slipping down the aisle, the passage I should say, at night, offering a lethal injection that they don't want. That the nursing homes in Holland are empty on the Dutch side of the border and absolutely packed on the German side of the border because you're safe in Germany from the administration of an uncalled for and unwarranted lethal injection.
So these statements are repeated and we are asked to try and assess and adjudicate this complex position, but I suggest to you that the most graphic evidence of why these laws, when they are introduced, work, is to look at the populations who have lived under those laws.
Look at the surveys done in Holland and why they're very proud about their law. And they don't give a damn what the international community thinks because they know that's the best way for their society to go.
Go to the Northern Territory and ask why is it that the one politician who's most hated up there is Kevin Andrews, the politician who single handedly effectively, although he did have the support of John Howard and Kim Beasley of the federal parliament, overturned the territory's first law. Territorians are proud of their law, and they did not like the way it was overturned.
This idea, that wherever there's been legislative initiatives taken, that the population are frightened, simply doesn't bear out. We've heard reference to the Aboriginal community being so frightened, that there was somehow or other, the idea that legislation was the modern equivalent to the poisoned waterhole and if you went into a medical clinic you'd be put down without your consent. Again, much of this is lies, half-truths, that's peddled and perpetrated to try and undermine our support.
But go and look at the population in the Northern Territory. I've come from there, yesterday. I know what people think, up there. They want their law back, and when the territory gets stated, it'll be the first law that's passed. It wouldn't matter if it was a law on bed-wetting. They still want it back. They want it back because they want to say to the rest of Australia, 'we can make laws about essential issues such as life and death, and we will'.
Finishing off though, I want to make one reference about comment about the medical profession's role. It's true, the implementation of legislation enshrines the role of the medical profession, and it's often not what people who are dying want.
You can die without a doctor. You don't actually have to have someone standing there with a white coat along your side. You can do it yourself. Death is a natural process, it doesn't have to be handed over to the medical profession, and that in itself is one of the most serious, I think, problems about legislation, and why ultimately, I believe self empowerment, people acting themselves, to initiate processes to make sure that they've got control, will be the way we see this issue proceed. Thank you."
Source ? www.lifeweek.org
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