English Bill: Death with Dignity Bill — First Reading 
English Bill: Death with Dignity Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:610;Page:7483] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 I rise to oppose this bill accepting the modus operandi and integrity of its parliamentary proponent. I oppose this bill for a simple reason: one of the strongest presumptions in our law is the presumption against taking a life. Our own Crimes Act makes it quite clear that the taking of a life is culpable—that is if one takes a life that is examinable by the rest of the community as to its purpose and intent. We as lawmakers have for the whole life of this Parliament now set a high threshold around the taking of life. I oppose this bill because it lowers that threshold. I do not believe that the proponents of it have mounted anything like a strong enough case that the threshold around the assumption against taking a life should be lowered. 
The effect of our law in the case of those people who find themselves in extreme circumstances is predictable and straightforward. If one is involved in taking a life then the circumstances of that will be examined. It will be in the hands of the Crown as a prosecutor the police the courts and ultimately juries made up of New Zealanders to then dispense justice. As we look back through the occasions on which that has happened at the cases that are commonly discussed in respect of voluntary euthanasia we find that juries of our peers do make decisions according to reasons that they give as mercy justice compassion and forgiveness. So it is not the case that our system of law is unable to distinguish one intent from another when it comes to taking a life. It is able to make those distinctions. It is able to determine whether compassion and mercy were involved or revenge and hatred. That is why we should not lower the threshold against the taking of a human life and that is the fundamental basis of my opposition to this legislation. 
The bill sets out a process by which we can validate the taking of a life. I have to say that no process is good enough to be free from the pressures the envies and the hatreds to which any human being can be prey. No process is good enough to be free from that and if the House wants to look to a process that it has tried to construct in the past to achieve those ends then it can look at the Contraception Sterilisation and Abortion Act because it has a remarkably similar process to this one. It includes experts doctors consultants and references to mental health and everyone knows that it has become a conveyor belt to abortion. MPs need to keep in mind that if that is the track record of this Parliament’s capacity to devise a process to protect the vulnerable then we have failed utterly. As a Parliament we just simply turn our faces from the failure of that legislation because it has now become a social norm that abortion is acceptable. That is 25 years on from when the legislation was passed and I say we could stand here in 25 years’ time and say exactly the same thing about the process in this bill. 
I shall comment on a couple of aspects of the bill. The first is the use of the term “incurably ill”. I can remember a chilling moment in the last debate on television about euthanasia when one of the proponents of the bill Michael Laws a former MP was asked about the case of a dreadfully handicapped 14-year-old child and whether his legislation would include that child to which he answered truthfully “yes”. At that moment he lost the debate. “Incurably ill” in this bill “means a medical condition which is generally accepted by the medical profession as seriously impairing the person’s quality of life”—how subjective is that—“and unlikely to be capable of cure either at the present time or in the reasonable future”. 
I have sat as a constituency MP recently with the parents of severely autistic children. If one wants to hear heart-ripping stories of the sadness and destruction of quality of life then one should listen to those parents. Any medical practitioner would find it almost impossible to say that a seriously autistic 14-year-old of the type that I have been dealing with lately has not had a seriously impaired quality of life and as much to the point has not seriously impaired the quality of life of the people who love and care for him or her. Those children are certainly not capable of being cured. So this is not a bill whose scope is limited to the aged or the terminally ill in their later years. 
This bill in terms of the definition of “incurably ill”—the term used in the bill; the definition I have quoted from the bill—includes anyone who has a seriously impaired quality of life and who may not be able to be cured. I say to this Parliament that if we go down that track we make the most vulnerable people in our community even more vulnerable not because they are being put under pressure to take part in death with dignity but simply because we have made that possible. How will they feel? What protection will the most vulnerable people in our community believe they have if we make it possible that two medical professionals a counsellor and a family can say to them that they have a seriously impaired quality of life? Do we imagine that pressure will never come on them? Of course it will! The vulnerability is not just about the process of making the decision but about the ripple effect this legislation will create simply because it makes death with dignity possible. 
 I turn to the term “informed decision”. What is an informed decision from a person whose judgment by definition is impaired by incurable illness or pain or by the fact that he or she is close to death’s door and is causing real distress to the people around him or her? This bill is a comfort for the living not a ticket for those who want to die—because that is always how the argument arises. Someone says “It is because I feel distressed that I want death with dignity—because it gives me discomfort to watch the pain.” Well pain is part of life and watching it is part of our humanity. Many of us have become more human for watching it whether or not we liked doing that. 
This bill is about comfort for the living. Let us not pretend it is about the dignity of those who have gone because they have gone and we have different views about where they have gone to depending on our beliefs. I do not think it is a duty of this Parliament to remove the basic presumption against taking a life in order to give comfort to those who encounter the very human experience of watching suffering.