Damned if I Do

by Philip Nitschke

  conscience. What possible right do[es] Kevin Andrews ... have to have exercised Bob Dent’s conscience for him?

  Anthony Albanese, Australian House of Representatives, Speech, Second Reading Euthanasia Laws Bill 1996

  I don’t remember when I first heard the name Kevin Andrews, but it has been stuck in my mind ever since.

  Kevin James Andrews is a pro-life lawyer from Gippsland, in country Victoria. A devout Catholic, he entered Parliament in 1991, and by 1995 was a backbencher in John Howard’s newly elected conservative government. As one of the four founders of the Lyons Forum, a secretive, ultra-conservative faction within the Liberal Party, Andrews is about as reactionary and doggedly religious as Australian politicians get. He is credited, if that’s the word, with naming the group after that historical anachronism Dame Enid Lyons. The forum was very influential under Howard, as it set itself to work against progressive moves in such areas as abortion, cloning and stem-cell research. Euthanasia was, obviously, a prime target.

  In contrast to the former prime minister, Paul Keating, who had declared the ROTI Act ‘within power’ and therefore not a matter for ‘disallowance’ (overturning) or meddling by the federal government, John Howard stated his opposition to ROTI less than four months after he was elected. On 25 June 1996, he floated the idea of a Private Member’s Bill to block the law. Two days later, Andrews stepped forward to do Howard’s bidding, announcing that he would introduce precisely such a Bill. Howard was said to have conspired with Andrews to introduce his Private Member’s Bill, indicating that the government would offer support if the matter came before the High Court.

  When word of Andrews’ manoeuvrings reached me in Darwin, I feared the worst. I knew the Howard ­government’s agenda was solidly right wing—Howard had proudly declared himself the most conservative Liberal Party leader since Menzies—and I was very aware that the Federal Parliament was awash with the religious, on both sides of the chamber. The then opposition leader, Kim Beazley, joined Howard in making his opposition to voluntary euthanasia clear early on.

  In 1996, with ROTI in force but under attack, I was fighting on multiple fronts—trying to helping patients meet the requirements of the legislation and trying to organise support to defend the law itself. I was living a rather fragile hand-to-mouth existence, bulk-billing some of the patients who were still on my books, and being stretched thin financially.

  I took it upon myself to try to organise a national defence of the ROTI Act—collective action. Several states had state voluntary euthanasia societies and I hoped to focus them on this cause. I travelled around the country to meet representatives of these groups and managed to set up a strategy meeting to bring these miniature fiefdoms together.

  I was dismayed when I found that there was no great enthusiasm for a collective stance. The Voluntary Euthanasia Society of Victoria was a standout. The president of this organisation, Dr Rodney Syme, and the secretary, Kay Koetsier, were taking a completely different, state-focused, tack. The Victorians would not support any campaign to lobby federal politicians, arguing that if the Andrews Bill passed there would be a national outcry. They were adamant that at that point, Jeff Kennett, the Victorian Premier and an ardent states-righter, would pass voluntary euthanasia legislation and thumb his nose at the Federal Parliament. I thought this politically naïve and thought as Dale Kerrigan of The Castle would have said, ‘Tell ’em they’re dreamin’.’

  In allowing a free vote on Kevin Andrews’ Euthanasia Laws Bill 1996, John Howard knew he was on safe ground. Although a clear majority of ordinary Australians believed that a voluntary euthanasia law was desirable, the opponents were politically, financially and organisationally powerful, and had little opposition from a voluntary euthanasia movement that had failed to unite.

  What became known as the ‘Euthanasia No’ campaign was spearheaded by sub-committees and individuals with church backing. Its ringleaders included Gillard ­government minister Tony Burke, then a shadow cabinet member; wealthy investment banker James Dominguez CBE AM, who has since been awarded the quaintly termed papal honour ‘Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great’; and Paul Kelly, then editor-in-chief—now ‘editor-at-large’—of The Australian newspaper. In his influential role as an issue-presenter and opinion-maker, Kelly was (and is) an unabashed opponent of end-of-life choice.

  Although there were Liberals, like Amanda Vanstone and Petro Georgiou, who supported voluntary euthanasia, the majority on the government side were in the Andrews camp. Greens leader Bob Brown and Labor members such as Jenny Macklin, Simon Crean and Anthony Albanese1 were outspoken defenders of ROTI, but many others in the Labor Opposition were very willing to see it overturned.

  Although the Northern Territory had the right to draft such a law, and set the conditions for the ROTI Act to be passed, the Territory Parliament had a crucial vulnerability. While it is an historical quirk, section 122 of the Australian Constitution allows for the Federal Parliament to also make laws for the Territories of the nation (for example, the Northern Territory, the ACT and Norfolk Island). By definition, this same section allows the Federal Parliament to make a law preventing a Territory from making another law. That is what the Andrews Bill set out to do.

  People queuing to use ROTI—Bob Dent, in ­particular—were acutely aware of this threat and often raised it with me. In September 1996, shortly before he died, Bob dictated a letter to be sent to the members of the Federal Parliament. He explained his condition and why he had decided to end his life. He continued, ‘I read with increasing horror newspaper stories of Kevin Andrews’s attempts to overturn the most compassionate piece of legislation in the world. (Actually, my wife has to read the newspaper stories to me because I can no longer focus my eyes.)’ Then Bob hit the nail on the head. ‘If you don’t want to use voluntary euthanasia, then don’t do it, but don’t deny me the right to use it if I want to.’

  The politicking went on and I remember an ­amusing incident when it looked like the Andrews Bill would reach the Senate. The Senate decided to send a committee of inquiry around the country, with a bunch of them ­turning up in Darwin to look into the question of whether the Federal Government should intervene to remove the Territory legislation. The hearings were convened, and the public invited to come in and put their views to the committee of assembled senators. The thing that stuck in my mind was this chap who had come in from the Victoria River region, and who looked like he’d been riding his horse for three days. He was ­bushman through and through, with his moleskins, Akubra hat and sun-wrinkled face. After he’d been sitting quietly up the back for a while, it was finally his turn to speak. He slowly got up and said, ‘I can’t understand why youse senators are so keen to try and get rid of our Territory law on euthanasia. Because, from what I can see, most of us Territorians want this law.’ He continued, ‘I think it’s about eighty per cent of us Territorians who want this law and I think that oughta just about constitute a mandate! In fact, I think it’s the sorta mandate that oughta give youse politicians an orgasm!’

  Everybody started laughing. Brian Harradine, the Catholic hardliner, seemed to wake up briefly. All the cowboy had done was state the obvious—if eighty per cent of people want something that does not infringe the rights of the other twenty per cent, why the hell would you be so keen to take it away from them?

  In the campaigning, and prolonged and vigorous debate in both houses of Parliament, every conceivable argument for and against voluntary euthanasia was raised. The persistently irritating South Australian MP Christopher Pyne (himself a practising Catholic) trotted out the church’s line to the letter, citing Armageddon in the Netherlands because of their euthanasia-decriminalisation experiment. The Dutch had decriminalised doctor-assisted suicide in 1993 and this allowed doctors who followed the guidelines to help a sick patient without being prosecuted, even though the act was still considered illegal. Full legalisation of the practice did not occur in that countr
y till 2002. At this stage though, rumours and myths about the dangerous practices going on in Holland were circulating, and Pyne trotted them all out as fact. He ended his speech in Parliament with the rather ill-thought-out conclusion that the passing of the Andrews Bill would somehow save lives: ‘I cannot in all good conscience oppose a Bill that I know, if passed, will save the lives of Australian people.’2

  More disappointing, perhaps because it was unexpected, was the attitude of ALP heavyweight Barry Jones, who said he was ‘singularly unimpressed by the argument that, [just] because public opinion polls support euthanasia, the Northern Territory’s law should be allowed to stand’. Speaking in the ROTI Act’s defence, Bob Brown kept it simple, referring back to the words of Wes Lanhupuy, the Northern Territory MP who had cast the winning vote for the original legis­lation, back in Darwin in 1995. The former member for Arnhem said:

  After all the debate and controversy, I said to people that I hoped that they would be able to give me the right to exercise my right as an individual. It is not hard to ask for a person’s rights as an individual. A man lives his life, whether for or against the law, and irrespective of ­whether he has received the rights that he has demanded or has had a cheerful life or otherwise. When he is about to make his last request, should we be in a position to deny him that last right which he wants? That is the question which I believe honourable members of this House will have to come to grips with by themselves …

  Brown continued:

  With no less charge, we in this Senate are challenged to give people that right, and not to deny it to them. We are charged to have the courage of the Northern Territory legislators. We are charged to respond to the undeniable force of public opinion in this country, and I charge all senators who have not yet made up their minds in this matter to think carefully about that preponderant public opinion—to give the people a say if you cannot make a decision against overriding this legislation, which will set the clock back decades in what is an inexorable move in the global community as well as here in Australia towards granting everybody the right to opt for voluntary euthanasia.

  The Andrews Bill was finally passed by a handful of votes in the Senate, and now only needed the Royal Assent of the governor-general to become law. At that point, I decided to take a leaf out of the Vietnam draft-resisters’ book.

  I had watched the debate on the television in Bob Brown’s Parliament House office and saw that it was ­obvious the bill would pass. I mentioned to Natasha, one of Bob’s legal researchers, that I thought it would make a good point to burn copies of the ROTI Act and the Northern Territory Constitution on the steps of Parliament House, and she organised photocopies from the parliamentary library. The ROTI Act only amounted to six pages, but the Territory Constitution was a thick stack of paper. You can’t just drop a match on a bundle of paper like that on a cold windy Canberra night and expect it to burn; you need an accelerant.

  ‘We need some petrol,’ I said, ‘but how do you get that in Parliament House?

  She said, ‘Leave it to me.’

  Because she had a staff pass and didn’t have to go through the regular security, she was able to smuggle in a small screw-top petrol bottle. Handbags are marvellous things at times. When Bob Brown and I, and others, were ready to walk out to face the nation’s media, I excused myself for a minute, took the papers into a toilet and soaked them in the petrol. Out on the steps, in front of the cameras, I lit a match and they went up in a sheet of flame. It made a dramatic newspaper photo.

  * * *

  The most immediate victim of the Andrews Bill was Esther Wild. In my book Killing Me Softly, I wrote at length of Esther’s terrible plight. Anyone interested in the intersection of morality and politics, and the hazards of ­providing slow euthanasia by morphine infusion, should read that account. What Esther had to endure is painful to recall. Here, I’d like simply to put on the record the cruelty of those ­politicians who resisted her wish to be allowed to die peacefully under the ROTI Act. Esther had already qualified as someone who could use the law; she had her papers signed and was ready. However, she didn’t want to die right away; an avid gardener, she wanted to see the flowers in her large tropical garden bloom one more time. In qualifying to use the law, she had her insurance policy of choice in place. Or so she thought.

  Once the Andrews Bill passed the Senate, the timing of Esther’s death came down to the governor-general, Sir William Deane. She knew she would need to act before the ROTI law was lost, and decided on the Easter holiday period as her time to die. However, Deane would have none of it, taking the extraordinary step of giving assent to the Andrews legislation late on the Thursday afternoon before Good Friday. In doing so, he ignored a personal plea from Esther to wait at least until after the Easter public holiday.

  Deane’s reputation is forever tarnished—in my estimation—by his actions, and that he then delegated to his press secretary the job of telling Esther of his decision, behaviour I felt was nothing short of pathetic.

  And so Esther was left with no choice but to die a slow and difficult death. I gradually increased Esther’s morphine dose, but even in doing this there was risk in this post-ROTI environment. Again, Steve Baddeley came to my assistance, by driving his Porsche out to Esther’s house in the rural outskirts of Darwin and providing his support for this grim slow euthanasia procedure. At one point Esther briefly regained consciousness, and called out to her close friend Cathy who was nearby. Her final words, ‘Am I dead yet, Cathy?’

  Murray McLaughlin made another Four Corners ­program, this time about Esther, called ‘The Dying Game’, and there was a subsequent medical inquiry into what actually had happened.3 Steve Baddeley backed me all the way.

  Some time after Esther’s death, her partner, Martin Williams, confronted Deane on one of the governor-general’s visits to Darwin. Martin pushed through the crowd ­outside the city’s art gallery and yelled, ‘You bastard, you’re the one who didn’t have the guts to let my Esther have a decent death.’

  ELEVEN

  Moving on

  May I wish Mr Kevin Andrews a long and excruciatingly painful life.

  Letter to the editor, Sydney Morning Herald

  Even though I had become the face of the voluntary euthanasia struggle, I still wasn’t consciously intending to make this my life’s work. That crept up on me.

  After the disappointment of failing to organise a united national euthanasia movement, I changed tactics. In ­forming the Voluntary Euthanasia Research Foundation (VERF), now called Exit International, my idea was to provide people with information about their end-of-life options. Sick people still wanted to die, but I was also being approached by well people—particularly the elderly—who wanted to know more about voluntary euthanasia, and in particular, what possibilities now existed with the loss of the ROTI Act. These people drove the agenda and influenced what happened next; their needs abolished any thoughts I had about stepping away from the issue.

  VERF wasn’t well organised, structurally or ­financially, but donations started coming in; one five-figure cash amount even arrived in a shoebox. I continued to work as a doctor but I also began to conduct information workshops. The very first workshop I ran was in Melbourne in 1997. The manager of the Downtowner Motel in Lygon Street, Carlton, Tim Nicholson, had been in Darwin when the voluntary-­euthanasia debate raged. He was a strong supporter of the movement, and he provided me with free accommodation and a meeting room to conduct the workshop. I was nervous, although there were no more than a dozen or so elderly people present, sitting around a table. In two ways that first workshop set the ­pattern of things to come: first, those attending were elderly, average age around seventy-five years, with slightly more women than men and, second, the group wanted to know all they could about how to get the best end-of-life drug, the barbiturate Nembutal. I ran that session in the way that has become standard. I gave a talk outlining practical options, alongside the legal con
straints and considerations. I then threw the session open to questions and discussion, saying, ‘You tell me what you want to know and I’ll do my best to answer.’ It was a very small beginning for something that would become bigger than I ever imagined. These days, with Exit workshops running around the world, it’s not uncommon to get over two hundred people at such events.

  The workshops start with a free public meeting in which I explain to the group why it makes sense for them all to learn how, and acquire the means, to be able to peacefully and reliably end their life at the time of their choosing. It is a simple argument. With no euthanasia legislation in place, no one can lawfully help you die and the penalties for assisting someone are savage. Suicide, though, is not a crime, so if you carry out the act yourself no legal risks are taken. Plan ahead, I argue. Don’t leave it until you find yourself so sick and incapable that you have to ask those you love to assist you to get you the lethal drugs you need. This argument strikes a chord, and most of those attending stay on for the following closed workshop, which is the practical Q&A ­session on how to ­suicide. To stay on, participants need to join Exit, and that is how much of the funding for the organisation is obtained.

  Before VERF, an incorporated association, became Exit International, a public non-profit company with ­externally audited and publicly viewable accounts, things were very informal. Back then, I was helped by Des Carne, who’d found the Camperdown squat while I was at medical school and helped me build the Deliverance Machine. He came to Darwin, put a demountable on my rural block and started helping set things up. He was self-taught and interested in computers, and created a database so we could coordinate the growing number of letters and email coming in, and also keep an eye on the finances. It was an amateurish outfit though, and our record keeping was fragile.

  Since that time, I have been able to eke out a humble financial existence thanks to the generosity and ­contributions of supporters. While my opponents often accuse me of growing rich out of death, the truth is very different. For the last decade, I have drawn around $50 000 a year as my salary from Exit International, a fraction of what I was making annually when working as a Darwin doctor in the late 1990s. These days, the organisation’s main income is from annual memberships and book and merchandise sales, and grosses around $500 000 a year. The average membership age is seventy-five years, and unless there is a good reason, only those over fifty years can join. There are many, though, with good reasons. One memorable example was the Melbourne writer Angelique Flowers, who died in tragic circumstances in September 2008, aged thirty-one. She suffered her whole short life with Crohn’s disease, but it wasn’t until she received the even worse diagnosis of terminal bowel cancer that she made contact with Exit. We met and talked at length about her options. Shortly after this she acquired the Nembutal she desperately wanted, but was then hospitalised before she was able to use the drug. Her filmed YouTube appeal to the prime minister at the time, Kevin Rudd, to change the euthanasia laws in Australia has become an important motivator for younger people looking at the euthanasia issue.1