Thursday 5 December 2019

Voluntary Assisted Dying Passes the Upper House and now...

VAD, not all it seems...

 24 September 2019 The WALabor Government's leader, the WA Premier said — "This is good legislation. It is very well drafted and carefully considered. The government has devoted a huge amount of resources to this bill. It does not require amendment".Now his pressure inferred was, no amendments, rubber stamp it in the Upper House & send it back so we can rubber stamp it with our numbers in the Lower House and rush it through without any alteration at all.

Roger Cook MLA, the WALBor Health Minister went from a respectful middle ground approach BEFORE the Premier's comments to going off the deep end a bit & wanting a solid quick analysis to get the job done quick smart, he said - “The fact they have sought the call, moved so many motions and asked so many often repetitive questions really just shows they’ve got contempt for the public” 

 “There’s no reason they cannot do a solid piece of analysis and scrutiny of the Bill without unduly delaying it … now is the time they get on with it and finish the job.”

Some how amendments weren't needed yet 55 amendments were made & lets break them down and ponder on them...

25 came from Nick Goiran MLA        (Lib)
18 came from the Government           (ALP)
6 came from Martin Aldridge MLA    (Nats)
4 came from Adele Farina                   (ALP)
1 came from Martin Pritchard             (ALP)
1 came from Alison Xamon                 (Greens)

So the WA Labor Premier has quite a bit of egg on his face.

a) Of the 55 Amendments that were apparently not required according to the Premier, 23 came from his own Government (Labor Party).

b) Adele Farina MLA (ALP) was in support of Voluntary Assisted Dying voted against the bill because in her words "When I put that question to myself, I came to the answer that I just cannot do it. I know that a lot of people will be very disappointed by that, but I cannot put people in harm’s way. In the full knowledge that my vote will make no difference to the bill passing, I have decided to err on the side of protection of the vulnerable and those who will not get the promised peaceful and pain-free death and to vote against the bill at the third reading."

c) There's a number of concerns for the Government to address, how much in the implementation phase will be sorted by bureaucrats and not have any input by the parliament? Definitely some & we're talking about legislation that seeks to make legal the supply of poison to a person so they may take their own life.

d) There's concerns the amount of data collected is insufficient for the process to be constantly improving. During debate we heard of several people in other jurisdictions that either did not die, or did not die well or peacefully. One taking 88 hours to finally die. Its why the Netherlands overseeing body collects and interprets data to ensure that the taken life is one done so humanely, quietly and as pain free as possible.

e) There are the concerns that a medical practitioner or doctor may not be able to be a conscientious  objector to the practice, he/she will have no choice.

f) A specialist is not required to end you life, why? Because there'd be an added cost of making a specialist available to those in rural & regional WA, a cost the Government who wanted this bill did not want to pay for. I'm at a loss as to why a properly qualified specialist could not be flown to where ever needed in WA, because the best estimates are its unlikely that even as many as 50 people will take up the VAD option and of those who do, a proportion will pull out. So we're not talking 50 patients a year in regional WA. It might be very few.

Now it goes to the Lower House. Now we'll see more stupid comments about denying or delaying WA people an option. Which is odd as the Bill will pass now & as for delaying, best estimates for the VAD system going live (no pun intended) will be 12-18 months time. Add to that many people are going to be very disappointed because the VAD is not what they think, eligibility is very very small.

Now had this gone to a legislative committee as Rick Mazza & others hoped for, the Upper House would have been freed up, and the work would have been done with some of the many glitches they identified corrected.

Its not perfect, its got some serious concerns within it. Will they be corrected we don't know, I suspect the anticipated political capital the WALabor Premier hopes to harvest is of greater importance & any & all glitches go behind a departmental shroud to allow the Premier to crow more freely.

Now consider the Twitter exchange below between Labor's Leader of the Upper House Sue Ellery MLC & Labor Lower House MP Jessica Stojkovski MLA and ask why the hell is it that the Legislative Council doing its job as a House of Review, with the Government lodging 18 amendments itself is viewed as "truly an affront to our democracy" ???
Prior to entering Parliament at the last election she worked as a town planner...which serves an important function in society without having any knowledge about democracy at all I guess. Such is the life of a Socialist MP perhaps.


No the legislation has some bad glitches, but democracy won, rubber stamps didn't.
Jessica, please read up on democracy, because I don't think it means what you think it means...
Should also add, there's 2 Australian states (nearly) 6 US states and 6 other countries where VAD type laws have been passed and are working (but not entirely problem free). This was important milestone legislation, it should have always taken as long as it takes...not met some arbitrary deadline that suits the Premiers press release timelines. It would have been a disaster had the original bill been passed without amendment because here's the kicker, all the missing safeguards, all the required changes would have to be done by departmental bureaucrats not the Parliament...or not done at all & we wouldn't know until a serious incident hits the press.

Overseeing those bureaucrats would be ministers. The Law would have a parliamentary framework but the actual facets of law would have been dictated by a political party, the WA Labor Party. They would have got it installed to suit a political timeline & the details would be sorted out later. That's still going to happen unfortunately, but less so.

But note the potential political mess that was avoided. Even though this Bill has some serious glitches, so bad it caused a Labor MP in favour of VAD to vote against the Bill there's another greater pair of issues.

Labor's conscience vote isn't mush more than a faux conscience voted evidenced by the pressure Adele Farina MLC has copped.

More importantly, had the Premier got his way, had the original Bill been passed without amendment then most of the acts of actual law making would have been done by bureaucrats in Government Departments overseen by WALabor Ministers INSTEAD OF HAVING ANY RIGOUROUS PARLIAMENTRY SCRUTINY.

WATCH THIS SPACE, THIS IS A VERY CONCERNING EXAMPLE OF THE GRADUAL SIDE STEPPING OF THE PARLIAMENT WHEN LAW MAKING. ONCE THIS DOOR IS OPENED, IT WILL DESCEND INTO A SPIRALLING HELL AND THE IMMENSE DAMAGE IS INCALCULABLE.

LABOR WANTS TO MAKE LAWS VIA THE DEPARTMENTS UNDER THEIR CONTROL AWAY FROM THE PARLIAMENT AND THE HOUSE OF REVIEW. 

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