I am watching the debate.

Let’s see if Mr Seymour will take into account the huge concerns.  Let me start with a little description of the current state of the Bill.  I will stop opposing the Bill only if the issues below, that I have discussed in my submission to the Parliament in March 2018, are properly addressed.

The severe lack of safeguard

In this badly written bill

Shows arrogant disregard

For the disabled and ill.

To ignore the concerned voice,

To let one end ‘nother party,

He might've made end of life choice

For the life of his party.

The End of Life Choice Bill has not enough effective safeguard to prevent or detect misdiagnoses and inaccurate prognoses, coercion and manipulation, cost-cutting and greed.  The Bill allows eligibility for euthanasia and assisted suicide based on one doctor giving diagnosis and prognosis, and one or two doctors verifying competence, but no examination from the courts or police.  The Bill cannot ensure that the doctors verifying competence has access to diagnostic tests – it requires only a superficial examination and paperwork.  It is too easy for the “eligible” person to be influenced (intentionally or not) or even pushed to take that option, when there are so many gaps in the healthcare system.  The government is not even funding certain drugs that are funded overseas.  It is not providing CBD to relieve suffering and some life-saving cancer drugs.  Decriminalising things may be a politician’s popular decision, but is it helpful?  What can you choose?  Assisted dying?  More pain with less hope?  Or rob a bank?  Also, the “eligible” person can easily be made to feel like a burden to their family and society.  Look at our shocking elder abuse statistics and disability discrimination.

I think the Bill needs to earnestly have the strongest safeguards possible to ensure actual, not just theoretical, free choice.  At the very least, there needs to be better support for the ill and disabled before enacting assisted dying legislation.  Also essential is additional oversight from the courts and the police to prevent and detect coercion and manipulation. In Montana, assisted dying has to go through the court. In Switzerland, assisted suicide cases are attended to by police as usually "open and close" cases. In the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada, the safeguards have not been adequate.

Government must address its own role in setting policies and practices before having national conversations about the eligibility of disabled people for legislated assisted dying.  In the spirit of social justice, our law needs to protect everyone including the vulnerable.  Government should not build a road to death for disabled people before removing roadblocks on the road to a full life.

We should ensure access to good palliative care for everyone needing it.  No person with terminal illness or grievous irremediable medical condition in a developed country like New Zealand should be in so much suffering that he/she chooses death over living.  When seriously ill patients receive good palliative care, they rarely want to end their lives.  The truly compassionate response is to ensure that everyone has access to the best physical, emotional, social and spiritual care they need, when they need it.  We should show that they matter, they are not a burden and we care about them, so that even those with no hope of recovery have the hope of loving and being loved.  ‘Assisted dying’ cannot address the non-physical reasons behind such requests.

Government should legalise and allow access to non-psychoactive medicinal cannabis for people in chronic pain that cannot be effectively addressed by other pain relief.  Many people suffering from chronic pain also have terminal illnesses and/or grievous irremediable medical conditions.  It would be cruel to offer them ‘assisted dying’ but not allow them to live with higher quality of life and less pain.

Mental health services need to be improved to address the issue of high rate of suicides and suicide attempts, including those of ill and disabled people.  All suicides are tragedies, whatever the method and rationale.  We need to be consistent in valuing human life as a civilised society. Government departments like MOH and MSD could work with non-profit organisations in suicide prevention and in providing social and spiritual care.

The safe way of honouring the right to die is to ensure that do-not-resuscitate orders and refusal of treatment, nutrition and hydration by the patients are honoured.  Government could make advanced directives legally binding, ensure patients have appropriate information on their rights, and impose significant penalty for artificially keeping patients alive against their clearly expressed will.  More efforts could be made to prevent healthcare facilities from profiting from artificially keeping patients alive against their will.  We already have the right to die (just not to choose when and how), so we should not be in a hurry to legalise assisted dying and, at the same time, sacrifice the safety of the vulnerable.

We should wait for most of the developed world to demonstrate with compelling evidence a safe way of allowing assisted dying before we consider legalising it.  Any law change that will lead to death must be carefully investigated.  An assisted dying law is safe only if nobody dies by it under external pressure or influences.  Those who are eligible for assisted dying ending up dead is not an indication of safety.  Granting a tiny and vocal minority the choice to be killed will undermine the choice of many others to live.

I oppose the Bill because choices are not made in a vacuum, and there are too many appalling risks.  in a time of fiscal austerity, and with an aging population, with a high suicide rate, and discrimination against disabled people continuing a problem, we ought not to offer killing (even at one’s own request) as an acceptable medical alternative.  Pressure upon elderly people to get out of the way, more expensive palliative care being elided in favour of death, and disabled people’s safety at risk; all of these things become more likely if assisted dying becomes legal without adequate safeguard.