Wow this is extraordinarily tone deaf from Mary English – I believe passionately that there are excellent reasons to be against assisted suicide but linking a bad idea to social tragedy for point scoring belittles the entire debate.
Let’s be very clear, the moment assisted suicide is legalised, it won’t just be used for Alpha personalities who can’t tolerate the idea of losing dignity in their final months of life, the same Government that abuses the mentally ill, prisoners and beneficiaries will use euthanasia to whittle down the cost of keeping vulnerable people alive with ‘education’ campaigns reminding the terminally ill and suffering they can apply for this.
I agree with Mary English’s concerns about euthanasia, but to equate that to youth suicide is ugly.
Yes some prominent people do put their foot in their mouths real easily don’t they just?
Who said in the 1950’s ‘in our day’ that “women were the gentler sex”?
I think it’s important to understand this meme in context.
It was not created or published by Dr Mary English, but by an Australian anti-euthanasia organisation.
They took a sentence from her oral submission to Parliament’s Justice Committee, in which she was deliberately using this statement to illustrate a point. She speaks from about 15 minutes into the video at https://www.facebook.com/JUSCNZ/videos/483245495476655/.
Thank you for pointing that out.
For a moment there I thought SIQ had deliberate confused feelings around suicide for the purpose of making an offense political point. If I were a suicidal (I’m not) youth (well beyond that) and read this message meme poster it might push me over the edge ffs.
Renee, I’ve watched the video clip of Mary English speaking to the select committee and the meme accurately reported what she said. There was no context that altered the meaning of her comparison of youth suicide and assisted dying for the terminally ill.
Which Australian anti-euthanasia organisation created and published the meme?
New Zealand’s very own Lady Macbeth, Mary English, thinks she’s doing terminally ill people a favour by opposing assisted dying because their ticket to heaven is expedited if they suffer in agony as they die.
“it won’t just be used for Alpha personalities who can’t tolerate the idea of losing dignity in their final months of life”
..as someone who’s partner has sat at the bedside of a mother dying of cancer, and an Elderly gentleman at the end of his painful journey, both of whom begged to be allowed to die, and having my own grandmother make the same request, I must say that statement is equally tone deaf.
Its not ‘just’ about dignity, though, you know, do you have a problem with people wanting dignity?…its about the futility of unbearable pain, confusion from drugs, inability to clear away the fog, loneliness and helplessness, when the final outcome is already known.
Is gunnah have a run in local government with those elections coming up in October?
The proposed legislation is only going to provide this for those who are in their final months of life (with a terminal illness) and who ask for it.
The idea that this could be a threat to those without a terminal illnesss is risible in so many ways.
Really SPC?
So you can tell us all Bruce, straight faced, that there has never been ANY attempt by ANY Government in NZ Political history who has attempted to rationalise health budgets with death?
Yes, really. The sponsor of the legislation has said he will be supporting such a limitation to its scope.
The irony is that it is the compassion for the suffering shown here that also inspires more generally such things as universal public health and old age pension super.
And thus it is no surprise that those most vehemently opposed to euthanasia in parliament, even this circumstance, are also those most likely to obstruct improvement in funding for government (National Party caucus) and run down ACC (the consequence of the failure to grow the NZSF 2008-2017 means huge budget pressures are looming in the decades ahead – not that tax cuts first National give a damn).
And I counter that by saying, what a load of naive bullshit.
So when National tried to create the death lists in the 1990s, which of course you would be familiar with, as who on earth would ever dare to comment on the current euthanasia bill without referencing the death lists of Jenny Shipley, when they created those death lists, do you think if they had assisted suicide legislation they wouldn’t have made it industrial?
The other countries that so many like to point to as some sort of guide, have far longer and better established safe guards. NZ, being a juvenile nation, doesn’t have any such cultural checks and balances.
This is being written for alpha personalities who would blush at needing help in their final stages of life, it will be the poor and Māori who of course bear the full brunt of such callous legislation.
Back in the mid 1990s Jenny Shipley (then Minister of Health in the Bolger National Government) established a governmental body called the Core Health Services Committee (CHSC) which was chaired by former broadcaster Sharon Crosbie.
The CHSC was known to exist, but no one paid much attention to it, and also getting information out of it was problematic as it would cite commercial confidentiality as a reason for withholding information. So a lot of its work went under the radar.
Back then, National had created a commercial model that replaced health boards with Regional Funding Authorities (RHAs) and hospitals became Crown Health Enterprises. It wasn’t until 2000, that the new Helen Clark-led Labour-Alliance Government disestablished the RHAs and CHEs and reestablished publicly elected health boards, and, hospitals became public hospitals once again.
But back in the early to mid-1990s the Core Health Services Committee was accountable directly to the Minister of Health, Jenny Shipley, and was tasked with creating health funding frameworks, protocols, criteria that the then RHAs would rely upon when deciding what health services the government would pay Crown Health Enterprises (CHEs) for – when providing health ‘services’ to ‘clients’ (patients).
The Core Health Services Committee was tasked to evaluate a way of reducing the cost-burden on the Government for health services and come up with a set of criteria that CHEs and doctors would have to abide by when deciding which ‘clients’ (patients) would get treatment and, importantly, who would not.
In August 1994, I became aware that the Core Health Services Committee had been evaluating the most costly procedures, including renal dialysis treatment for people with end-stage renal failure. I was told by sources that the CHSC had drafted a document that included a framework for how expensive treatments would be handled, and that the Minister of Health had approved the plan.
Generally, there are two types of criteria:
inclusion – (meaning patients that met certain criteria would be eligible for treatment)
exclusion – (meaning those that could be labeled as possessing or exhibiting specific criteria would exclude then from being offered treatment.
In August 1994, I was leaked documents that displayed how the Minister had approved the CHSC protocols that used exclusion criteria and that the protocols had been presented to doctors and the exclusion criteria enforced.
What this meant was people who presented with end stage renal failure, and who required dialysis to stay alive, would be excluded from getting this life-saving treatment if they were deemed:
* to be blind
* to have an intellectual disability
* had a history of mental illness
* exhibited or expressed anti-social behaviour
* had a history of imprisonment
* had an unrelated health condition that may cause complications
* were over the age of 65-years…
The set of exclusion criteria continued on.
Without a public debate having ensured, CHE doctors were required to administer the changes and CHEs were required to report back to the RHAs with details on how the exclusion criteria was being applied.
Up until then, doctors and clinicians had decided on whether a patient would get dialysis treatment – the assessment was based on what health benefits a patient could expect, and were not required to consider exclusion criteria that were determined by the State.
The moment this legislation passes, a Wellington bureaucrat will immediately start looking at how one can define ‘terminal’. Your faith in them is appalling.
The legislation’s definition of terminal is apparently going to be within a few months of death – fairly definitive I would have thought. And something determined by expert medical opinion, not some bureaucrat.
And as you have noted with a past reference, the real risk is government determined management of scarcity in health funding and deliberately, via tax cut policy, creating that scarcity.
That those who are most inclined to go down that path, also oppose this limited form of euthanasia, should inform all of us where the real threat is and is not.
I’m sorry, so Jenny Shipley never existed?
You posit something that happened when there was no euthanasia legislation as the threat that will emerge when there is.
You argue that we should accept that people will and should suffer in their last months of life, because if we don’t what has already happened might then come to pass.
Seriously unconvincing. It’s irrational.
The very people who tolerate that suffering continuinuing without batting an eyelid are the same people who are the threat to running down our public service funding. They put their ideological regime first and people second in both areas.
Those who oppose euthanasia after its limitation to those in their last months with with terminal illnesses, when they have effectively won the debate over boundaries, as defeatists – appeasers of the very people they claim to oppose.
If you wish to trust wellington bureaucrats who gave us the synthetic cannabis death spree, the state house meth hysteria and the census cock up with something as sacred as the States obligation to life, you do that, but sweet Jesus I will repeatedly damn everyone who green lights this once my worst fears are realised.
Update. We used to be patients. Then we became clients.
Now we are ‘customers’. They have Customer Service Officers – or some such – employed to send out the decline letters, but my elderly neighbour circumvents them by calling an ambulance and getting herself admitted directly and processed.
“Back in the mid 1990s Jenny Shipley (then Minister of Health in the Bolger National Government) established a governmental body called the Core Health Services Committee (CHSC)….”
It was earlier than that: more like 1991-2. I was working in the health services at the time. I’m pretty sure that Simon Upton was MoH; the CHSC was set up under his watch. Bill Birch succeeded Upton as MoH. Shipley was MoH only from 1993-1996.
“The CHSC was known to exist, but no one paid much attention to it…”
That’s not at all how I remember it. There were public meetings and a good deal of publicity. We were interviewed by officials collecting information for the Committee.
At that stage, neoliberalism was a tsunami about to break over the health services; in 1991, Simon Upton had released his green and white paper. Some of us sardonically referred to the health reforms as the Great Leap Forward. And our cynicism was well-founded.
The government was looking to cut costs in the health sector. The Committee was attempting to devise a method of rationing access to healthcare, and it was looking to the Oregon model.
“Without a public debate having ensured, CHE doctors were required to administer the changes and CHEs were required to report back to the RHAs with details on how the exclusion criteria was being applied.”
As I recall, there was considerable publicity about the rationing issue; and considerable opposition to it from health professionals. I can remember one case (of access refusal) hitting the headlines and severely embarrassing the government. It’s very difficult to justify such a decision on national TV and not come across as callous and heartless: an accusation no politician wants to have flung at them.
I believe that the notion of rationing was abandoned as unworkable, not least because many health professionals were of the view that they were being asked to act against their ethical standards. In addition – humans being what they are – attempts to apply criteria which either allowed or blocked access proved to be impracticable.
“National had created a commercial model that replaced health boards with Regional Funding Authorities (RHAs) and hospitals became Crown Health Enterprises.”
A point of clarification here: Regional Health (not funding) Authorities. I’d add that, prior to this development, the health sector had already been through an organisational change: the move from Hospital Boards to Area Health Boards. This happened from about 1983, under the aegis of both the National and Labour governments.
With regard to Seymour’s End of Life Choices Bill, despite – or perhaps because of – my prior experiences in the health sector, I’m a firm supporter.
“…the moment assisted suicide is legalised, it won’t just be used for Alpha personalities who can’t tolerate the idea of losing dignity in their final months of life….”
This is an unfortunate stance on your part, if I may say so. It isn’t for any of us to sit in judgement on, or to second-guess, the motivations of terminally ill people wishing to die on their own terms. People must give consent for this process; this means that they must be competent to give consent. Absent competence, consent cannot be assumed.
Nor ought we to ascribe malign intentions to public servants who aren’t involved in clinical procedures. Our health services are desperately under-funded, but it doesn’t follow that funding authorities are going to use the proposed legislation to connive at bumping people off without their consent. Even in the neoliberal Wild West CHEs of the 90s, nobody did that. Really they didn’t.
Over the last several years, we in this household have been obliged to endure the deaths of several family members and close friends. We’ve seen quite a lot more of the workings of hospitals, and of the care afforded to the dying, than we’ve wanted to.
There has been no rationing: if anything, the opposite.
At least three of them would, I think, have been pleased to have been able to have the choice as to when to die. As things stood, they’d got as close as they were able to under the current law, having inserted a DNR notice in their medical records.
I understand why Mary English takes such a stance: it’s essentially a religious view, and she’s a mickey-drip (the faith of my childhood). I don’t know whether the same applies to Martyn; for the life of me, I can’t make sense of his objections.
Speaking to the journalist who uncovered Jenny’s state sanctioned death lists, he says you are glossing over many things here. There was no clear explanation of where these targeted death lists were going and the so called consultation was a con job.
If you wish to trust wellington bureaucrats who gave us the synthetic cannabis death spree, the state house meth hysteria and the census cock up with something as sacred as the States obligation to life, you do that, but sweet Jesus I will repeatedly damn everyone who green lights this once my worst fears are realised.
Martyn: “Speaking to the journalist who uncovered Jenny’s state sanctioned death lists, he says you are glossing over many things here.”
I reiterate: the rationing model was proposed here. There were some sporadic attempts to implement it, but they foundered, both on the tricky issue of practicability, and on clinicians’ unwillingness to act against their ethical principles.
Talk of “state-sanctioned death lists” makes NZ in the 90s sound as if it were a fascist polity. It was not. Clinicians – frequently accused by the neolibs of “provider capture” – fought a hard battle against the rationing model as proposed by said neolibs. The clinicians prevailed, luckily for the rest of us.
It doesn’t follow, however, that there wasn’t – and isn’t now – rationing of access. But the reasons for that were (and are) based on clinical criteria. Health services were underfunded at the beginning of the 90s; the situation is orders of magnitude worse now, I’d guess. Thus access to some care is crimped by lack of money to pay for resources, and to employ enough clinicians to carry out procedures. Were I in your shoes, that’s an area on which I would train my metaphorical guns.
“If you wish to trust wellington bureaucrats who gave us the synthetic cannabis death spree…”
That was Peter Dunne, as I recall. The law of unintended consequences applied there.
https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/375177/a-drug-experiment-gone-wrong
“…the state house meth hysteria….”
The CEO of HNZ took a very stiff-necked line on that issue, despite countervailing evidence adduced by Nick Kim from Massey uni (I think). Mind you, he had bags of support from pollies and the general public. As I discovered when I joined the debate online. On Kim’s side: I’ve always favoured scientific evidence over public prejudice.
“…and the census cock up….”
The previous National administration. I’ve also heard a good deal of optimistic “spin” from the Statistics office.
“…something as sacred as the States obligation to life…”
Aside from enabling – or at least not prohibiting – legislation, the state has nothing to do with it. Adults must give consent, and be competent to do so. Which excludes the comatose, those with dementia, those with intellectual disabilities.
I’m an advocate for the state treating us like grownups and keeping its nose out of our end-of-life decisions. For the same reasons – women can make their own decisions regarding abortions – I favour repeal of the CSA, with nothing to replace it. I can’t see an in-principle difference between the two issues.
SPC: “And thus it is no surprise that those most vehemently opposed to euthanasia in parliament, even this circumstance, are also those most likely to obstruct improvement in funding for government (National Party caucus) and run down ACC (the consequence of the failure to grow the NZSF 2008-2017 means huge budget pressures are looming in the decades ahead – not that tax cuts first National give a damn).”
Indeed. Neatly put.
I have given this topic some consideration over the years, weighing up all the pros and cons and personally I don’t sit comfortably with euthanasia being introduced into legislation.
Despite original good intentions, state sanctioned euthanasia in my opinion will alway have a dark, ominous shadow hanging over it.
Mary_A: “….state sanctioned euthanasia….”
The whole point of Seymour’s Bill is that end-of-life choices can be made by us the citizens. The only sanctioning on the part of the state is that parliament enacts legislation which forces the state to get out of the way and allow us to make our own decisions in this regard.
Mary English ” former first lady of New Zealand ”
Everything about that poster is utterly offensive and lacks any credibility.
There simply is no way we can ever allow any government or to be exact the National party permission to legally murder New Zealanders.
The fact that this vote is a conscience issue is a problem right there because National MPs never act with any conscience when it comes to being ruthless with any form of humanity unless they are rich.
If this had not been such an emotive issue to make it law then Jenny Shipley and her ministry would have had the opportunity to rid the country of people that would be a drag on the health budget and as they did with ACC and deny people access to treatment by arguing that their illness or condition was ” degenerative ” and refuse their claim.
I know because it happened to me and many others.
I have never trusted David Seymour’s motives in anything let alone a law like this and his pretending to be compassionate is quite frankly frightening and insulting.
Would you leave him alone too look after members of your family in the hospital ward ?
have to agree. Mary English is way way off base with that comment.
I guess the thing I don’t like about Mary’s comment is that her husband Bill English was publicly destructive and negative about our young NZ males, which was the last thing this country needed when we are already world leaders in under 24 year olds killing themselves.
I don’t know if the English’s have the capacity to differentiate between boys like their’s with well educated parents on high incomes,and kids from Hokianga for example, with small dairy farmers basically squeezed out of business through no fault of their own, and second and third generational unemployment.
Some of the comments about seasonal work like fruit picking involves breaking up families and disconnecting communities with callous disregard for social effects. We’ve already got families living lives straight out of Steinbeck, but it’s globally infinitely worse for others, with Filipino mothers for example, supporting their families by leaving them, and working all over the world – UK – Middle East- as domestics and exploited drudges.
And right here in NZ our young blokes have been displaced by el cheapo imports not just keeping wages down, but with imports often also exploited by their own people – and resented by our people.
How different it could have been if Bill English had decided to see our young men as future assets worth investing in, but whether he lacked the capacity and the vision, or was being fiendishly business-friendly I just don’t know, but dismissing them as a group I thought morally reprehensible, and making them part of the euthanasia equation sickly assumes that we are all gullible, which we are not.
some religious people need to read their bible again some are very judgemental and it s not christian like to be so judgemental after all they ain’t God.
I can’t imagine the bill will ever pass, not because it shouldn’t but because if you add up [the god fearing + non voters + triggered/gamed pro lifers like Mary English & Maggie Barry] they will be the majority… So thanks for deciding not just for yourself but for everyone… I can only hope when you & all that voting group are on their painful death bed, the doctor says ‘thats enough morphine for you, the ROI isn’t worth you having anymore… time for you to suffer as per your voting choice’
And to answer your big fear that its a cost saving exercise, FFS how hard is it to have a basic statement in your legal life plan that ticks the box: ‘no euthansisa for me thanks.’ Perhaps it could even be the default. Then you could STFU & let everyone else make up their own mind.
Ted: “And to answer your big fear that its a cost saving exercise, FFS how hard is it to have a basic statement in your legal life plan that ticks the box: ‘no euthansisa for me thanks.’ Perhaps it could even be the default. Then you could STFU & let everyone else make up their own mind.”
Hear hear! Exactly.
Memories are short in the English household
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/96701209/nat-mp-simon-oconnor-jacinda-ardern-encourages-suicide-with-euthanasia-stance
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