An open letter to PM Abbott: the choice of a lifetime

In our small way, we wish to raise awareness, raise much-needed funds for research, and to assist the people and families suffering from this dreadful disease.

I have the utmost respect for our public institutions, and in particular the office of the Prime Ministership. Growing up, I loved listening to my father and uncles passionately discuss the political issues of their day. This helped shape my values and sense of community service, and how I can make our world a better place.

I once had personal, though some may say delusional, aspirations in leading this great nation of ours, and even completed a Master of Politics and Public Policy as my hobby to better my community and myself.

While we may have differing philosophical policy positions on certain economic and social issues, I greatly respect and am inspired by your explemary leadership during the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, which has tragically taken the lives of innocent people, including Australians.

It reveals your extraordinary compassion, empathy, and strength in a time of uncertainty and pain for suffering families, friends, and Australians as a whole.

Today, I reach out to you in many Australians' time of need on another serious matter. Your leadership on this matter means a great deal to many Australians with a terminal illness, to their families, friends, and those Australians who believe in freedom of choice in ending one's life with peace, serenity, and dignity.

This is an issue that needs our Prime Minister to be fearless, courageous and lead from the front. It is an issue that politicians cannot continue to afford to dance, duck and weave which makes Muhammad Ali proud. I believe Australians overwhelmingly support the freedom and empowerment of choice on this matter.

We are rightly proud and accepting in fighting and heroically dying in war for a nation's cause or ideal on foreign soil. But that bravery and acceptance does not extend to those battling from a terminal illness, and who wish to end their suffering.

We have the decency to end man's best friend and other animals suffering to relieve them of their pain. But that decency does not extend to our human kind, at least not in our country.

And at the other spectrum of life, we permit the termination of life by aborting a life within a womb, a life that is unable to express their right to live or die. A life is a life at conception and not some arbitrary date post conception. So it seems illogical to prevent someone with the ability to think rationally and express the desire to end his or her life unable to do so.

The debate should not be decided based in favour of one's personal religious beliefs. We need to rise above the tribalism of religion, which is contorted by personal agendas and misunderstandings of Biblical references dependent on one's faith, and which has killed countless innocent lives in the name of God.

While raised a Catholic, as time goes by you realise we are more than a particular religion, and that humanity is one church of souls learning, teaching and supporting one another. Whatever your definition of God, God does not take sides based on one's religious leaning.