SpeechALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa): Thank you Madam Chair for the opportunity to speak on this committee stage. I'm going to talk mostly about clause 8 and what is a very lightweight attempt to protect those from coercion.But I'd like to start off and it may have already been mentioned earlier saying that a society is judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable—Nelson Mandela Mahatma Gandhi and others. This clause 8 just does not protect the most vulnerable in my view. David Seymour talked about in a previous setting a couple of days ago how the evidence of cohesion cannot be found anywhere where assisted dying has been legalised. Now I've never heard such nonsense as that sentence. It is just obviously wrong to say coercion does not exist. We know coercion exists. We do it here all day every day; that's what our job is. We are here to influence. We are here to coerce. We are here to compel. We're trying to convince each other that our policies are right and the others' are not so right. In the schoolyards kids are coercing bullying and hassling each other every day. Every day in the workplace it happens. Coercion is alive and well in our communities. In Parliament coercion happens on a regular basis. We've had reviews about the bloody subject. It's ridiculous that David Seymour has somehow decided that there is no evidence of coercion because he doesn't want to see it he doesn't understand it—at best that is naive. Coercion is alive and well.In fact the worst place that we can see coercion is in our own homes. In some of our homes in New Zealand coercion is at its best. We have partner abuse we have child abuse and we have sexual abuse in our own homes. And then to say that there is no such thing because we can't see it is naive and unfortunate.We talk about elder abuse—that's known; we wear ribbons to acknowledge elder abuse. We're not talking about killing them; we're talking about stealing their money whacking them around the head if they don't take their medicine you know keeping them up late at night not putting them to bed when they should be not wiping their butts when they need it—that is elder abuse that's the minimum side. And here we are today really wanting to go hard with the elder abuse by allowing sometimes family members to coerce those elderly people to kill themselves. This lightweight protection in clause 8 does nothing—nothing at all—to protect those who are our most vulnerable.I've had constituents ring and email and I'm sure we have all had these examples where we've had people say Euthanasia is a good thing. Grandma's on her last legs. We've been visiting every week or every day. She wants the easy way out. She wants to go now." I don't get the email from Grandma. No grandma has ever emailed me to say that; it's the family that have said that. You've got to ask yourself what is motivating these people to suggest that Grandma wants to leave this place ahead of time. It's in their own self-interests that they want Grandma to leave ahead of time. It is because they don't want to see Grandma old elderly having to have her butt wiped and sleeping for most of the day. They don't want to see that because that's not what they're used to seeing Grandma as. But Grandma has never asked me to support this bill; it's only ever been families of elderly people who think that it's required for the dignity of Grandma. But in fact it's for their own self-pitying self-centred self-interest that they want Grandma out of here early."