In the new vibe Parliament of 2022, the likely passage of a bill to give territories the right to legislate on voluntary assisted dying represents perhaps the clearest break from the politics of old.
It was exactly 25 years ago that prime minister John Howard oversaw a political process which stripped the democratic rights of ACT and Northern Territory residents to decide for themselves on the issue.
Then NT chief minister Marshall Perron, who led a Country-Liberal government, remembers it clearly. He introduced a private member’s bill that heralded the first voluntary euthanasia legislation in the world.
“The federal legislation was an appalling, unjustified interference,” Perron tells Crikey. He reserves a special venom for Labor’s Tony Burke, who led the campaign to torpedo the territory’s law through federal legislation: “Tony Burke should reflect on the terrible suffering caused for thousands of people over those years.”
Burke is one of the few of the old guard opponents of voluntary assisted dying — which he might prefer to call euthanasia — still in the political fray. Now a senior minister in the Albanese cabinet, he has seemingly been around forever — though he is barely in his 50s.
His position hasn’t changed. Burke wasn’t available for comment but it is known that he will vote against the new legislation. He expects he will be in the minority and that the legislation will pass.
Back in the 1990s Burke was a young Labor Party operative on the rise. He was aligned with the conservative Catholic wing of the ALP from the era dominated by the likes of the John “Johno” Johnson, the formidable union official, fundraiser and MP who was implacably opposed to voluntary euthanasia and abortion.
Before he was in Parliament, Burke joined up with with the socially conservative Liberal MP Kevin Andrews in a carefully coordinated campaign to gain cross-parliamentary votes for the Euthanasia Laws Act 1997. Members voted according to conscience rather than on party lines.
Fate has now delivered what some might consider a delicious moment of karma: as leader of the house, Burke will be facilitating debate before a conscience vote is held.
Catholic opposition is not straightforward
The Euthanasia NO campaign which Burke led in his 20s brought together a powerful network of Catholic politicians and wealthy business people. It was, as The Australian’s Michael Gordon described it, “a case study in the art of persuasion, with subtlety rather than intimidation or coercion being the secret of its success”. The campaign kept a deliberately low profile, a tactic said to be integral to its strategy.
Publicly Burke has downplayed a link between his religion and his position on VAD. He has spoken of being swayed by the views of a medical specialist working in palliative care. He has also referred to a friend who he said had survived a terminal medical diagnosis.
Anthony Albanese is one of only three current MPs (by Crikey’s count) to have been in the Parliament when the 1997 legislation was passed. Now it has fallen to him, as prime minister, to give the government’s backing to the introduction of the private member’s bill to overturn what Burke had fought for.
Albanese has always listed Catholicism as one of his three great “faiths” (along with the South Sydney Rabbitohs and the Labor Party). But he is not the kind of Catholic to fall into line with the dictates of senior clergy, such as the activist Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher. Already Albanese has been reproached by The Catholic Weekly for electing to be sworn in as PM by making a secular affirmation without reference to God, rather than taking an oath on the Bible.
The Sydney archdiocese has become increasingly strident about Catholic politicians who don’t do their religious duty in the Parliament. The Catholic Weekly said NSW premier Dominic Perrottet’s decision to allow a conscience vote on voluntary assisted dying as “one of the most humiliating examples of meek acceptance of evil ever seen”.
But the prize for most remarkable contribution from a man of the cloth must surely go to Father Frank Brennan, one of Australia’s most senior Jesuits. Brennan has a religious opposition to VAD, yet he has crafted an intellectual and moral argument which backs the passing of the territories’ legislation.
At parliamentary committee hearings in 2008, Brennan, then a professor of law at the Australian Catholic University, said he “readily conceded” that “if there were a state in the Commonwealth which had legislated for euthanasia, I think it would be highly inappropriate for the Commonwealth Parliament to say: ‘We would not permit the territories to do this.’ ”
Quizzed further, he added: “If, for example, New South Wales were to legislate tomorrow for euthanasia then I would say that in terms of political morality the territories should be given the power to make equivalent type laws.”
A decade after Brennan made his comments the dominoes started to fall at the state level, starting with Victoria and ending earlier this year in NSW — leaving only two small islands: the ACT and the NT. (Crikey sought Brennan’s comment now that his projection has become a reality but hasn’t heard back.)
More royal than the royals? If any member of Parliament were to stand in the way on religious grounds then they must surely be more Catholic than Father Frank Brennan.
