BUSINESS

Dr RYAN (Kooyong) (12:39): I second the motion to suspend standing orders to reintroduce the bill sponsored by the member for Curtin. The most vulnerable moments in our lives are those in which we enter this world and those in which we leave it. I want to acknowledge here the doctors, nurses, pharmacists and healthcare professionals who provide end-of-life care across this country.

I believe that we shouldn't put those professionals at risk because our laws are outdated and misdirected. Within weeks, every state and territory in Australia will have passed laws legalising voluntary assisted dying. Voluntary assisted dying is not a choice between life and death.

All it does is enable terminally ill individuals to take control of their imminent and inevitable death by choosing its manner and its timing. Suicide is a choice, often made in crisis, between continuing life and not doing so. It is an entirely different circumstance.

Australia's leading suicide prevention organisations all agree that the conflation of voluntary assisted dying with suicide is wrong. But a 2005 amendment to the Commonwealth Criminal Code aimed at online material inciting suicide, created more than a decade before VAD was legal anywhere in this country, makes it a federal offence, with penalties of over $300,000, to use a telephone, video conference or email—a carriage service—to discuss lawful VAD services.

This means that a doctor can lawfully care for a dying patient in a clinic but that the same care delivered over the phone, because that patient is unable to travel, is a federal crime. It means that doctors can't call or use telehealth to review symptoms, to adjust doses, just to answer questions. It means that prescriptions can't be emailed or texted to a pharmacy and that, in Queensland, voluntary assisted dying medications have to be posted or hand delivered.

It means that dying patients often have to travel hundreds of kilometres to receive the care that they need and deserve—often in distress, often in pain. It means that sometimes they die before they can access the end-of-life care that they want. Demand for VAD is growing, but up to 40 per cent of people who begin the process don't live to complete it.

The member for Curtin's bill makes a simple and single amendment. It excludes conduct lawfully undertaken under a state or territory VAD scheme from the Commonwealth carriage service offence. It doesn't touch existing strict state eligibility criteria or safeguards.

Capacity assessment, coercion screening and identity verification remain mandatory in all states and territories. They ensure that all individuals freely and repeatedly choose what they're requesting. This bill would not make VAD telehealth only.

No-one has ever supported that, and statements to the contrary are wilfully misleading. Best practice medical care is always face to face, but this bill permits clinicians simply to exercise the same clinical judgement over the use of telehealth services that they exercise every day in this country for palliative care, for psychiatry and for the termination of pregnancies.

The AMA, the Law Council, the ANMF—more than 20 health organisations, including Palliative Care Australia, support this change. State attorneys-general and patient support groups have called for this action. Two weeks ago, the ALP's national conference entrenched it in the party's platform.

And yet it's been reported that cabinet will not permit us to vote on this issue here. I seconded the member for Curtin's private member's bill on this issue in February 2024 and wrote to the Attorney-General at that time, imploring him to act on this. The bill was allowed to lapse without a debate and without a vote.

Two years on, with the ALP's platform now aligned with doctors and with dying patients and their families, there is no good reason for delay. As a doctor, I know this is a very sensitive issue, but, as a doctor, I also know that all Australians deserve the very best practice end-of-life care. This simple bill would enable this.

So I urge every member of this House to support the suspension motion to reintroduce this bill, to give it the debate and the vote that we were denied in 2024, to prevent even one more Australian dying in unnecessary pain because this House continues to fail to right a longstanding wrong.