You can check out any time you like but ….

… you can never leave. Most of us are familiar with these lyrics from the Eagles’ song, Hotel California.

By happenstance these lyrics approximate the fate that faces many thousands of citizens lying comatose for long lengths of time in hospices, nursing homes and similar.

This issue has not received the attention it deserves.

The proposed amendment by religious-minded politicians to NSW legislation to force aged care residents out of residential aged care if they seek Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD), and changes to the federal government’s Aged Care Act which will likely increase fees and charges to senior citizens managing their own care in their own homes, using a partly funded package aimed to assist them, or those in residential aged care, have received nearly all recent attention.    

Ian Chubb’s 23 September 2024 Canberra Times article, ‘Given the choice, would my wife have chosen to ‘let dementia take its course?’’, raised an equally important issue.

 Ian Chubb is a former chief scientist of Australia, and former vice-chancellor of The Australian National University.  He described the beyond appalling circumstances of his wife’s long drawn-out death from the effects of dementia. But her situation is grimly common.

A 16 April 2025 article on the website of the Go Gently organisation details an instance of how this legislation worked in an end-of-life moment in Victoria.

John Hunt, 62, signed up for VAD when it was discovered he had the worst kind of brain tumour, a glioblastoma.   

Philippa Featherstone, John’s sister, reports that ‘although John was in terrible pain, he couldn’t have any morphine on the day of VAD as he needed capacity to be eligible for the procedure. Emphasis added.

So, John Hunt needlessly faced great pain, which was like state-imposed torture at the worst possible time, so he could say ‘I want to die’.

If that isn’t bad enough, what of those who ‘lack the capacity’ to say ‘I want to die’ so the VAD process can commence?

It would seem that if the thousands of dementia patients subsisting in residential aged care across Australia cannot say these words they cannot go. They cannot leave until they die of natural causes, many after long periods of time, in dreadful circumstances like Ian Chubb’s wife.