BUSINESS

Ms CHANEY (Curtin) (12:28): I move: That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the following from occurring immediately: (1) the Member for Curtin presenting a Bill for an Act to amend the Criminal Code Act 1995, and for related purposes; (2) debate on the second reading of the bill proceeding immediately for a period of no longer than one hour; and (3) any questions required to complete passage of the bill then being put without delay.

I do not move a motion like this lightly—suspending standing orders is an extraordinary step—and I recognise the House doesn't take it lightly either. But I'm asking for one hour of debate and a vote on a bill that has been sitting on the Notice Paper for three months, that was first introduced to this parliament more than two years ago and that fixes a single, narrow, well understood problem.

I'm asking for that hour because every week this parliament delays is a week in which dying Australians and their families continue to suffer for no reason connected to their own choices, their own illness or their own state's laws but because of an accident of Commonwealth drafting two decades ago. Voluntary assisted dying, VAD, is lawful in every Australian state and the ACT, with the Northern Territory expected to follow this very month.

Every one of those jurisdictions has a tightly regulated scheme. A person must make multiple formal requests for VAD to a doctor, including one in writing. They must undergo independent clinical assessments by doctors who've undergone mandatory training.

There's a requirement for independent witnesses as well as independent board oversight of every case to monitor compliance, track medication, review cases and report directly to parliament. Australian VAD laws are considered some of the most prescriptive, the most highly regulated, in the world, and the safeguards are working. VAD deaths make up a tiny proportion of all deaths in Australia, between one and three per cent annually, consistent with other countries where assisted dying is legal.

There have now been more than 7,000 voluntary assisted dying cases across Australia since 2019. Each has been examined by a government appointed independent review board, as well as parliamentary reviews and independent studies. There has been no evidence linking VAD frameworks to elder abuse or coercion.

Yet sitting above all of that carefully built state and territory law is a Commonwealth provision, subdivision G of the Criminal Code, aimed at pro-suicide websites and chatrooms, inserted in 2005, more than a decade before any Australian jurisdiction had legalised VAD. This provision makes it a criminal offence punishable by fines of more than $300,000 for a doctor to discuss lawful voluntary assisted dying care with a patient over the phone, by email or by videocall.

The practical effect of this provision is that no part of the VAD process can occur by telehealth, not one consultation. Every assessment, every request and every question a dying patient has for their doctor between appointments must happen in person, no matter the distance, the pain or the time that patient has left. Australia's the only country to criminalise the use of telehealth in relation to VAD appointments this way.

I want the House to understand what that actually means for real people, because I don't think this parliament has properly reckoned with the human cost of this anomaly. Researchers at QUT's Australian Centre for Health Law Research spent years interviewing patients, family caregivers, doctors and nurses across Victoria, WA and Queensland precisely about this.

One doctor described the law bluntly. The barrier around what can and can't be discussed over a carriage service in the era of telehealth is, in their words, 'just crazy'. Consider Brian Dick, an 81-year-old man from Swan Hill dying of prostate cancer.

Despite a broken back and broken ribs from a recent fall, Brian had to make a 4-hour round trip to Bendigo for his multiple voluntary assisted dying eligibility assessments, because telehealth was not an option. His pain medication could not remove his discomfort during that drive. His daughter Rebecca has described sitting beside him on that road as he begged her: Just stop the car, stop the car.

I can't handle the motion … That's what this law does to a dying man in his final months seeking care that is entirely legal. Consider Tom, a 79-year-old man in Queensland dying of lung disease, who died waiting for his voluntary assisted dying medication to arrive by post, because pharmacists have no legal choice but to mail it. Consider the two rural doctors who, in one documented case, made three trips totalling 8,500 kilometres to assess a single patient—kilometres, time and effort that could have been given to other patients waiting to see a doctor in parts of the country that already have too few trained VAD practitioners.

Consider Terry, whose daughter Emma brought a petition to this House on his behalf which I tabled last month. That petition was signed by more than 13,000 Australians and calls for this unnecessary Commonwealth restriction on using telehealth for VAD appointments to be removed. In his final week, simply reaching the bathroom was a huge task for Terry, let alone getting into a car for a medical appointment.

Emma said telehealth would have made an enormous difference to her father and would have given him back some agency and dignity in his last days. Instead, this Commonwealth anomaly took that away from him. These are not fringe cases.

The QUT researchers documented this pattern again and again—patients arriving in wheelchairs in their pyjamas, too sore and too exhausted to dress themselves, because they were not allowed to speak to the doctor by phone. These are delays that, in some cases, rob patients of their VAD choice. Despite being approved for VAD, Alan in regional Victoria died without VAD due to long delays in receiving the medication.

He died in the circumstances he feared the most. His wife, Zenda, described his death as the most horrific end. This is the problem.

Let me turn to the bill this motion would allow the House to debate and pass. The fix in my bill is deliberately narrow. It inserts a single amendment into subdivision G of the Criminal Code, making clear that lawful voluntary assisted dying, carried out in accordance with the state or territory VAD law, is not suicide for the purposes of the Commonwealth carriage service offences.

That is the entire substantive change. This amendment does not touch a single safeguard that exists under state and territory law in relation to VAD. It doesn't mandate telehealth in any case.

It does not go anywhere near the act of administration of VAD medication, which state and territory law dictates can only be self-administered or directly practitioner administered. What this amendment does affect is the earlier assessment process for VAD—the multiple formal requests and independent assessments needed to establish eligibility and voluntariness—and every decision as to whether or not telehealth is clinically appropriate in all of the circumstances for a particular appointment would properly revert to being a decision for the doctor engaged, because doctors and their patients are best placed to decide when telehealth is clinically appropriate, not the police.

Doctors already make these decisions in relation to every other area of Australian medicine in accordance with Medical Board of Australia telehealth guidelines. These guidelines require a doctor to continuously assess the appropriateness of using telehealth for a particular consultation. There is nothing novel about this.

Telehealth is already an established practice for serious, complex, life-and-death clinical decisions across Australian medicine, particularly in rural and remote areas, where it's often the only way a patient can reach a specialist at all. My bill does not ask the parliament to invent a new category of medical practice. It asks the parliament to stop treating voluntary assisted dying as the single exception where telehealth cannot be used.

At its national conference a fortnight ago, the government's own party membership resolved to remove federal barriers to end-of-life care, including telehealth, while maintaining appropriate clinical safeguards and resolved that this should be a conscience matter for its members. This is why I am asking this House for one hour not to relitigate whether voluntary assisted dying should exist but to determine whether this ordinary, trusted clinical practice should be treated as a crime.

The Australian Medical Association, the Law Council, VAD regulatory bodies, 20 health organisations and state attorneys-general and health ministers all support this change. Now it is time to determine whether this House also supports that change. We simply want to let this parliament do what people like Brian, like Tom, like Terry and his daughter Emma have been waiting for years for it to do—pass a narrow technical fix so that a dying person can speak to their doctor without turning both of them into criminals.

I commend this motion to the House. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Chesters ): Is the motion seconded?