The euthanising of mentally ill people not terminally ill and in no physical pain could be authorised by doctors with no specialist expertise in the patient’s condition.
And the poison could be supplied by a child at home.
This is just some of the troubling analysis contained in a dissenting report prepared by a member of a Queensland parliamentary inquiry, Dr Mark Robinson, into that State’s up-coming euthanasia bill.
His analysis is relevant to New South Wales, where the radical leftist independent MP Alex Greenwich is also poised to introduce a euthanasia bill. Only Sydney’s Covid lockdown has stymied him.
Dr Robinson (his PhD from the University of Queensland is a non-medical doctorate) is the Liberal National Party member for the seat of Oodgeroo on Brisbane’s Redlands Coast and one of the few parliamentarians to make the public case against the use of lethal poison as “health care”.
His well-considered report dissects the bill and is informed by the hours he spent hearing evidence from both sides of the debate as a member of parliament’s Health and Environment Committee.
I decided to blog about Dr Robinson’s report because the dominant media narrative is that euthanasia is safe and needed to stop people dying undignified deaths in pain.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Concerns about inheritance-impatient children to be legally allowed to counsel for suicide, thanks to recommended law changes, are almost never talked about in today’s euthanasia debate.
A bill which waters down criminal law relating to murder and suicide should ring alarm bells and be more extensively debated, not rushed through a unicameral parliament by a Labor government with a thumping majority.
Was granny pushed or did she jump? We’ll never know under these laws. They protect everyone involved except the sick and vulnerable person who is susceptible to the idea that the right to die is really a duty to die.
The media almost never mention the abundantly available information about the overseas experience which would make any thinking person run from euthanasia.
Few know that in Oregon many people who take lethal poison pills under that American state’s laws often take hours and even days to die.
Dr Robinson references Victoria’s new euthanasia legislation which was introduced in 2017 on the basis that it would reduce suicides of the terminally ill numbering around 50 per year.
Yet the availability of euthanasia has not shifted Victoria’s suicide figures, with numbers steady at just under 700 during 2020, the first full year of operation.
In that year three times as many people were euthanised as advocates predicted – adding another 144 people to this annual suicide toll.
Except under euthanasia legislation, death certificates are falsified so the patient’s suicided or assisted suicide is not mentioned.
Queensland’s euthanasia bill sweeps aside concerns about chronic underfunding of palliative care so that most people thinking they want euthanasia will never know a dignified pain-free death surrounded by their loved ones is possible without a poison pill or lethal jab.
And like so much policy being driven by the radical left and the libertarian right, it has totalitarian impulses.
Forcing religious hospitals to perform killings of sick and vulnerable patients shows the modern secular mindset’s contempt for the sacred.
Dr Robinson’s work is rigorous and telling – we need more parliamentarians like him. It’s a shame the media ignore his work. You can read it here.
The CDP will be fighting the Greenwich euthanasia bill when it comes to the NSW Parliament.
Lyle Shelton is Director of Campaigns and Communications for the Christian Democratic Party. The Reverend Honourable Fred Nile MLC has asked Lyle to succeed him in the NSW Parliament when he retires in November. To keep in touch with Lyle and the CDP, sign up here.