Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well thank you very much Madam Chair. I thought it was perhaps a good time just to take a call and address some of the concerns that members of the committee have raised starting with Paulo Garcia who was the first speaker after the dinner break. He brought out what I regard as the old chestnut of undetectable coercion. It always reminds me of a question I was once asked at an airport in London: Has anyone put anything in your bag without your knowledge?" I paused for a moment and I thought: how do I answer this?Look I think if there was undetectable coercion it would show up in the data. It would show up in the data in an unmistakable way and that would be that the people whose lives were ended through assisted dying would be more often than not people who were vulnerable to coercion. They would be people who had less assertive personality traits people who had less education and people who were of lower socio-economic status and yet after extensive studies—as long as 15 years of studies in the Netherlands—what we've discovered is that actually it's not people who are more vulnerable who end their lives through assisted dying; it is the opposite. That pattern if there was so-called undetectable coercion it would show up in the data and it does not show up in the data. That is the fact. I want to turn to what Dr Nick Smith has said. I think really he's misconceived what the bill says and I draw members' attention to clause 8(2)(e) which says "encourage the person to discuss their wish with others such as family friends and counsellors;". Now Dr Smith has said that family are excluded under this bill. Well they can't be encouraged to talk with family and exclude family at the same time. Logically it has to be one or the other. Dr Smith would like to say that of course it should be mandatory for family to be consulted but if he was serious about that then perhaps what should happen—Hon Dr Nick Smith: Immediate family—immediate family. DAVID SEYMOUR: "Immediate family" Dr Smith clarifies. If Dr Smith is sincere about that then why not have that for all medical procedures? The answer is simple and that is it is people's privacy. It would cut across people's privacy to force people to have to talk to family members. What's more as has been eloquently outlined by Louisa Wall it's not necessarily a good thing in every family. Families are complicated as Maryan Street has often said in debates about this topic. I think it would be counter-productive to adopt Dr Smith's argument for those reasons. I must say Kanwal Bakshi said that I should do the hard yards on this bill. People have accused me of a lot of things but not of failing to do the hard yards on this bill. I do note that Mr Bakshi had tabled a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) only hours before the debate so people can make up their own minds about who's doing the hard yards. There were a number of people—well there was Alastair Scott. There was David Clark who talked about the Michael Woodhouse SOP and I think for the benefit of Dr David Clark in particular it's worth addressing the concerns that he has raised. I say to him first and foremost as I mentioned earlier I was a little bit surprised when he said that people of lower socio-economic status were more likely to access assisted dying in jurisdictions where it's been legalised. That is untrue and there's been fairly extensive studies over up to 15 years in places like the Netherlands where actually the opposite has been found to be true. So I was a little bit concerned that the Minister of Health took that view. But turning to the Michael Woodhouse amendment in my view first of all it is unnecessary for the simple reason that it's not clear why you would want to exempt institutions from obligations they don't have. There is nothing that institutions are obligated to do in this bill so it seems strange to exempt them. Second of all there are other parts of the particular amendment such as restrictions upon funding which make it effectively illegal for a district health board (DHB) to enter into a contract with any provider of any kind of palliative care where they did want to provide assisted dying. Now I'm sure Dr Clark as a good southern social democrat of Presbyterian stock would want public funds to be able to be used for things that are legal according to this Parliament. If he believes in comprehensive public health insurance and if he accepts the findings of this Parliament that it wishes to make assisted dying legal then it would seem strange to ban public funding of a legal service that some New Zealanders would be able to afford to access privately but others might not and I think for that reason alone the amendment should be defeated. It actually prevents public provision of the service. I say to those on my right that it might seem strange that I would say that. Well my view is that if somebody wants to go and require taxpayer funding then they've entered into politics. They have entered into a contest in a political discussion about what conditions should be attached to the use of public money and it's quite reasonable that among DHBs and institutions there would be such a discussion about what will be provided and what will be funded. That doesn't necessarily violate anybody's rights and it might give some comfort to Dr Clark to know that these debates have been played out in the Australian state of Western Australia—which has recently had the second reading of its bill that is similar to this one—in the Australian state of Victoria in the country of Canada and also before that in the province of Quebec. In all of those jurisdictions there has not been a carve-out of the type that is proposed here in the final legislation although it was discussed in all of them with the one exception being Quebec. In Quebec they actually went the other way and required that public institutions would have to offer assisted dying—which I am opposed to—and the reason they had a carve-out was against that more onerous public requirement which as I said in the opening we don't have in this piece of legislation. So look I really hope that that allays some of the concerns that Dr Clark raised because he does deserve an answer there. I hope I've given him a good one. We heard from Dr Shane Reti who I have to say has a beautifully pressed shirt and a very well-chosen tie. But besides that as I was listening to him I was thinking that he was asking for things that are in the Code of Health and Disability Services Consumers' Rights to be put into the bill. Now if it was the case that there were provisions in the bill that contradicted the code and of course in that case the statute law would prevail over the code then it would be necessary to clarify that actually people still have those rights in the code to be given proper informed consent over the medication that they're taking. But in actual fact there's no such contradiction so everybody is still expected to follow the code and give proper informed consent to all patients. Indeed if you go to clause 15 there is considerable requirement from the statute law as well that the doctors have a discussion about the type of medication that is taken and the methods and of course that involves the impacts. Any doctor doing their job as Dr Reti would well know would do that so I don't think it's necessary to amend the statute law to achieve that. We also had Louisa Wall who I thought gave a very good refutation of some of the points raised by Dr Smith. We also had Melissa Lee who challenged my word in the House that I'd somehow misrepresented what she'd said in an earlier debate. I checked the Hansard and I was right: she did indeed characterise the views of all Korean people and that's something that I think frankly members should try and stay away from. We should treat every person as an individual and judge them on their personal characteristics rather than stereotypes but that's just my view. Aside from that we heard from Ian McKelvie. Ian McKelvie is somebody who I have a great deal of respect for and I want to address one concern in particular that he raised which was in regard to the process. Mr McKelvie's been here a lot longer than I have—in fact he's been in a lot of places longer than I have—and I have to say to him that there's never been a longer process a larger select committee consultation or more work gone into a member's bill. I suspect it would be a very long time—longer than both of us have been here put together—so I do think that criticism is unreasonable. The other questions that Ian McKelvie raised around coercion and self-interest and so on I've addressed in response to other speakers—hopefully to his satisfaction. So that's all from me. I hope I've answered the concerns that have been raised adequately. I know there are some people I may never be able to satisfy but as they say God loves a trier and I'll keep trying."