Russell DeborahDr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): Like many members of this House I have spent a great deal of time thinking hard about this bill. I voted yes at the first reading and yes with the objective of spending time reflecting on the issues very very carefully indeed. I took the opportunity to go and sit on the Justice Committee from time to time so that I could hear at least some of the submissions for myself to hear from a range of people and especially to do what the previous speaker has just suggested we do: to seek out expertise and to seek out I guess information on which we could rely. It has been a difficult process. As some of the earlier speakers have referred to we have been lobbied intensively and a lot of the time the arguments from both sides have been at best disingenuous but often frankly misleading and twisting data to suit themselves. So it became an issue of whose opinion I was going to rely on and whose information I was going to rely on to make a call on what I should do.Like Mr Bishop like many of the speakers in this House I value autonomy and I value agency and I think we must respect those individuals. But for me it is precisely the individuals whose autonomy is compromised the individuals whose agency is compromised that we need to have concern for. Ultimately that is why I am changing my vote from a yes to a no. I thought in particular of people with disabilities and I felt in particular on older people and on young people. In terms of people with disabilities I listened very very carefully to people like Dr Hūhana Hickey but more recently I spent a lot of time reflecting on an article written by Chris Ford and published on the Newsroom site where Mr Ford talked about the issues that people with disabilities face in particular the social construction of disability so that people are not necessarily disabled by their bodies but they are disabled by the society which structures itself only around the able bodied. It is a society in which people with disabilities can find it hard to access medical care. It is a society in which people with disabilities can find it hard to access reasonable accommodation. It is a society in which people with disabilities can find it hard just to navigate the ordinary passages of human life. And as a society we do not support people with disabilities sufficiently. In particular we make people with disabilities feel that their lives are not worth living. How often does someone who is able bodied say I could not tolerate living if I ended up in a wheelchair."? But people with disabilities do that happily every day. This is what worries me in terms of people with disability and it is the information that Mr Chris Ford reported that already people with disabilities feel pressured to give up feel pressured that they must go away. I believe that we have a responsibility to support people with disabilities and until we have decent medical care until we have decent living standards until we have a society that structures itself around all bodies then it is dangerous to allow this type of bill to go through because of the impact on people with disabilities.One of the submissions I heard and that meant a great deal to me was the submission from the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners. They did not have an opinion on the bill itself. They declined to say whether they supported or opposed the bill. However what they did do was draw on the knowledge of their members to give those of us listening to them some ideas about this bill and they drew our attention to the incidence of elder abuse and the extent of it in this society. This is the second of my concerns: around elderly people who would feel pressured to give up their lives because they are subject to financial abuse they are subject to physical abuse they are subject to the abuse of lack of care. So when the Royal College of General Practitioners says that that is what they have noticed that is an opinion that I think is worth listening to.They also spoke of young people. It is something that others might not have noticed but in their considered wisdom they said "This is what should happen if this bill should go through." They said "If this bill should go through then the minimum age of eligibility for euthanasia should be set at 25 years." They felt that younger people did not have the capacity to make good decisions in these sorts of cases. They were worried about the capacity of young people's thinking. Now of course our human rights legislation won't allow that. But it did draw something else to my attention—this is a third of the groups of young people that I'm worried about—and it is the link to suicide. Now let us be very clear. Euthanasia is not suicide. I think it is specious to conflate the two. But here again I heard information from people who are experienced in dealing with this that worried me. And it was from submissions that I heard from school counsellors when I was sitting on the select committee. Their big concern was this: school councils say that in their experience of dealing with young people young people would see euthanasia as permission to commit suicide. Yes the two things are different but on the one hand with euthanasia we would be saying that it was permissible to end a life and the young people would see that as permission themselves. And we know that we have a problem with youth suicide in this country. I have to say that this one is particularly personal to me. It worries me intensely with respect to youth suicide.We have heard many speeches this evening—all of us I think speaking from personal and lived experience. I suppose there is not a member in this House who has not sat at the bedside of a dearly loved relative holding their hand as they leave this world. There is not a single one of us who has not thought carefully about this and I suspect that everyone is casting their vote very very carefully. It is for this reason that I wish to end not on the bill itself but on the process by which we got to this stage. It is something that I mentioned earlier on. This is a huge decision for us and we need good information on which to base it.When we have people giving us data but it's skewed in one direction—we got data telling us that a particular ethnic group supported the bill after all but it was based on 17 members of that group—that is not good data. How can we make a good decision if we are not given good data? We had—and I really regret this because I have personal friends who are involved in the Care Alliance but the Care Alliance sat there and told us that many of the submissions to the bill were not religious. But I sat in that select committee room and the written submissions were not religious but it was very clear from the actual spoken ones that many people were motivated by religious views but it was not in their written submissions. My plea is for some honesty. If a submission is motivated by religion brilliant—go for it—but don't disguise that. Be upfront about it. It's really important to let us know what is motivating you and where opinions come from. So my final plea for this bill is that people when they are talking to us as parliamentarians treat us with respect and treat us with honesty."