A prominent Coalition senator became overwhelmed with emotion on Wednesday as she spoke of her father’s death, and the way it transformed her views on assisted dying.
The Senate heard speeches on a bid to lift a federal veto that has prevented the ACT and the Northern Territory from considering euthanasia laws in what has been, for more than two decades, a block on law reform in the territories.
Victorian Senator Jane Hume voted against similar legislation in 2018, but has since changed her mind.
“I once felt in my heart that it was wrong,” Senator Hume told the upper house.
“I will be voting in favour of it today. We say in this place, when we make a decision, that we will walk a mile in another man’s shoes.”
The upper house had earlier heard from conservative MPs who cited statistics on euthanasia’s use in the states, and warned it might provide a slippery slope to suicide for the vulnerable.
Senator Hume said she had in 2019 similarly invoked “the theory that someone vulnerable may be guilted into deciding to end their lives”.
Her journey to change started by year’s end. Her father was diagnosed with cancer. It was terminal.
“That was the beginning of a harrowing few months,” she said.
She enlisted a colleague to assist her father to seek medical treatment due to a prohibition on family members involving themselves.
“No other family member can help organise, request or even discuss voluntary assisted dying — it must be the patient themselves,” she said.
“This is a good safeguard in theory, but a very frustrating one when you’re the daughter of a stridently adamant, single-minded but increasingly incapable father demanding your help.
“Having held the hand of the person that I deeply loved as he died peacefully, as he died painlessly, as he died willingly, and in the manner in which he wanted – in the manner in which he had always wanted and at the time of his choosing – I now feel very, very different.
“It was, truly, a beautiful death.
“Who am I to deny you the choice to leave this earth in the same beautiful way as did my father Steve?”
The bill is the subject of a conscience vote expected to be put by year’s end.
“This is very much a conscience vote, and I have in fact notified the chamber that my vote this time around is very different from my vote just in 2019,” Senator Hume said, after her speech.
“That’s because of my personal experience.
“I would never try to direct my colleagues in the chamber, in either chamber, on how to vote on a conscience vote. It is deeply personal.”
Senate leader Penny Wong said the territory rights bill will be put to a final vote before Parliament dissolves at year’s end.
ACT Senator David Pocock welcomed that news, and said it was a “huge relief”.
