Abstract
This paper provides a broad discussion about voluntary assisted dying (VAD) in Australia. The discussion examines the history of the VAD debate in Australia and whether public support for VAD and the arguments that have provided the framework for the VAD debate have evolved over time. This seems a prudent time to have such a discussion, given the very recent rush by all Australian states to bring about or attempt to bring about VAD legislation. This rush, inexplicably perhaps, comes after decades of attempted but failed progress in the legalisation of VAD in Australia. The authors attempted to undertake a systematic literature review for this paper, but the paucity of academic research and the lack of consistent terminology in this area made such a search untenable. Instead, the authors examined parliamentary documentation and then widened the search via the sources found within this documentation. The examination of available data showed that VAD has enjoyed significant public support from Australians over time and that the arguments in the VAD debate in Australia have been consistent over time.
Highlights
In the mid to late 1990s, several authors [2,8] put forward suggestions in an attempt to answer the question, “Why now?” Why was the voluntary assisted dying (VAD) debate becoming so prominent in Australia in the mid 1990s? What had changed in our society in order to bring this important issue to the surface at that particular point in time? How did the ROTTIA get through parliament and become legislation? Those authors have suggested that we, as a society, had changed and that the attention given to VAD reflected these changes
What Magnusson could not have known, though, was that it was not going to be the Australian public that was the greatest obstacle to legalising VAD across the decades but instead our politicians
McGee and colleagues [5] and White and Willmott [39] correctly predicted that the passing of the VAD legislation in Victoria would lead to the renewed efforts of other Australian states to introduce VAD legislation
Summary
On 25 March 1995, seven doctors in the state of Victoria went public, announcing that they had all been engaging in VAD—illegally, as there was no VAD legislation in Victoria at that time—and called for a bill to be introduced into Victorian Parliament legalising VAD [2]. These doctors were publicly pilloried and threatened with prosecution, and the call for an inquiry into
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