By Paul Russell:

It is perhaps a statement of the obvious that those who oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide are never happy about the passage of such laws. Paradoxically, those that propose them and those that support them are never really satisfied either.

There are a number of ways we can look at this reality. The most obvious angle is that, no matter how the laws are framed, there will always be a developing tension over time created by and on behalf of people who don't qualify. Such is the case at the moment in Canada where, in an act of appeasement to get their law through the Ottawa Parliament last year, a promise was made to look further into euthanasia and assisted suicide for minors, for mental health reasons and via advance directives. Studies are now underway to advance these causes.

The activists wanted more - but that would have been a bridge too far in the first instance.

A closely related tension also exists during the debate on such laws and in their design. Euthanasia and assisted suicide proposals slide along a continuum. Beginning at the extant prohibition, the further the proposals move away from that point, the more liberal and inclusive they become. At the same time, protections or 'safeguards' as they are often called are rendered more meaningless and simply vapourise in direct relationship to the distance away from prohibition.

The tension here is essentially between what pro-euthanasia and assisted suicide activists want and what they will ultimately settle for so as to gain a majority vote.

In South Australia last year a bill was put forward that was a long way down that line.

The Voluntary Euthanasia Bill 2016 was in essence very similar to the Belgium euthanasia model. It did not limit access to terminal illness but rather simply to a subjective 'test' of 'unbearable' and 'hopeless' suffering. Though it was claimed to be otherwise, so-called supposed 'safeguards' were notable by their absence.

The bill was rightly set to be rejected by a significant majority of parliamentarians when, at the eleventh hour, a raft of amendments were tabled by the proposer; a clear example of compromise in an attempt to get the bill through.

That the schedule of amendments constituted more clauses and more pages of text than the original bill is testament to both the laxity of the original proposal and the number of concerns raised even by MPs who supported the idea but not the particular form. The new form was itself rightly rejected by the slimmest of margins.

Was the first bill an ambit claim or not? Hard to tell. But euthanasia and assisted suicide without restrictions based upon a false claim to a 'right to die' and qualified by nothing more than a subjective assessment of unbearable suffering is surely the ultimate; the end goal in the euthanasia 'long game'.

Inveterate US Blogger and Nurse, Nancy Valko provided a further example of this argy-bargy and dissatisfaction in regards to the assisted suicide bill passed by the District of Columbia in December. She writes:

"In a December 2016 commentary article titled "End of Life Liberty in DC" for a publication supported by the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, lawyer and long-time assisted suicide activist Kathryn L. Tucker surprisingly criticizes the new assisted suicide law quietly signed into law by the mayor of Washington, DC. this month.

"While most people might believe that passage of yet another assisted suicide law would be cause for celebration for assisted suicide activists, Ms. Tucker is unhappy with the so-called "safeguards" in the DC law..."

"Ms. Tucker now complains about the "many burdens and restrictions imposed" by these "safeguards" which, ironically, are added by assisted suicide activists themselves when they "routinely face arguments of insufficient 'safeguards'"."

Valko then provides the list of the 'safeguards' that Tucker clearly rejected. Calling them a 'heavy governmental intrusion into the practice of medicine', Tucker's list is entirely about items that regularly appear in stock-standard bills of this type. As noted, these were clearly absent in the original draft - just as they were in South Australia. As in South Australia, the activists amended their own bill.

It is not difficult to imagine the kind of conversations that probably took place in DC and in the SA Parliament between activists and legislators. I don't think it at all cynical to observe, in summary, that the conversations would have been about what it would take to gain an MPs support. Compromise leaves all parties dissatisfied to some degree; for the activist, the salve is getting the bill - any bill - through.

It is ever thus.

In the last Western Australian debate in 2010 MP Robin Chapple said that he knew his restricted bill wouldn't please everyone but that it was a 'good start'. This makes clear the reality that someone else can come back and try to amend and expand the remit at some future moment. That same year in South Australia, MP Mark Parnell observed, in reflection upon the failure of his own bill, that too many safeguards would make any bill too restrictive and inaccessible; the corollary of this stark admission is that to make a bill work we must accept an increasing level of risk from abuse.

Victorian MPs should keep this all in mind in the coming months as preparations get underway for a bill to be tabled by the Andrews Government later this year. Once we move away from the extant prohibitions we begin to accept risks and, into the bargain, begin also to abandon the principle that the law and our society's primary task is the protection of all citizens equally.

'The evidence from other countries shows that risks of abuse are all too real and cannot be dismissed as speculative or distant'

'The safeguards built into any liberalised system would, furthermore, be vulnerable to laxity and complacency and might well prove difficult or even impossible to police adequately'. High Court of Ireland, Fleming v Ors 2013.

Parliamentarians will be told, as I expect they always are in this regard, that the proposal is 'only' about a limited cohort and 'only' in prescribed circumstances and 'only' after certain checks and balances are observed. As though this somehow makes state-sanctioned killing or approved assistance in suicide okay per se. It doesn't.

When we cross that clear bright line drawn and held in the one place for millenia, we do not simply crossover for the supposed few. If we cross for some, we cross for all.

"...to create an exception to the general prohibition of intentional killing would inevitably open the way to its further erosion whether by design, by inadvertence, or by the human tendency to test the limits of any regulation." House of Lords Select Committee 1998.

We will have enshrined in law the principle that it is okay to kill or to help people suicide - a 'right to be made dead'. If it is all about suffering, any restrictions invoking the 'only' gambit are really a house of cards.

There will always be Kathryn L. Tucker's.