You can check out any time you like but ….

In these situations, to all intents and purposes, hospices and the like across Australia could be characterised as Hotel Californias where many desperately ill citizens who would say they want the VAD process are ‘prisoners of their own device’because they have lost their capacity.

Advanced Directives only allow a citizen to ask that all life support systems, food and water be stopped. They do not include a provision that facilitates assisted dying to commence when it is plainly obvious the desperately ill should be helped to go.  

It seems this is the current legal and moral absolutist positions of state governments.

But how many of us are moral absolutists? The very democracy we live in is based on compromises, relativities and trade-offs.

The ACT government itself is relativist when it comes to the start of life: a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion is free up to 16 weeks of pregnancy.

A woman’s future in this social-medical situation is in her hands. She can choose, but the current Advanced Directive of a desperately ill citizen in a social-medical end of life situation discredits choice.

We have all heard of reports that life support is turned off, with family agreement, after it is clear a person is brain dead.

There are very many end-of-life situations where a person is to all intents and purposes brain dead, but not quite.

Surely, we can legislate for citizens who are suffering very badly in particular situations, with zero hope of recovery, to state in a revised, more humanitarian Advance Directive, that should they be in this situation they want the process to facilitate their death to happen.

In Hotel California there is also the line:

This could be Heaven or this could be Hell.

That is a possible future facing senior citizens when they enter an end-of-life residence. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety found ‘the prevalence of elder abuse in Australian residential care is estimated to be 39.2%.’

One thing is for sure: a direct experience of a loved one dying in a desperately bad way is usually convincing that there is more Hell than Heaven in our nursing homes and hospices, and law reform to let certain citizens go easily, and without pain, is a just outcome. 

In November the ACT government will be addressing its Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD) legislation.  A better outcome for residents in these situations is now in the hands of ACT legislators.