In 1995, the Northern Territory Parliament passed Australia's first euthanasia law: The Rights of the Terminally Ill Act (NT). In 1997, the Commonwealth Parliament overrode the Territory law with its own Euthanasia Laws Act. The Commonwealth law did not repeal the Territory law but it rendered it inoperative.
In 2008, Greens leader Senator Bob Brown took the opportunity, once the Howard Government was out of power and no longer in control of the Senate, to introduce his Rights of the Terminally Ill (Euthanasia Laws Repeal) Bill. It was a very shoddy piece of legislative drafting and went nowhere.
The introduction of the bill was ham-fisted. Even the Northern Territory Government opposed the bill. The Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, Paul Henderson, said at the time, 'I find it very high-handed and arrogant of Bob Brown from Tasmania to be introducing legislation in the Federal Parliament that affects the Northern Territory, without any consultation at all with the Territory Government, or the people of the Northern Territory.'
If the bill had been passed, it would have had the effect of resuming the operation of the original 1995 Territory law which by then even Dr Philip Nitschke had conceded in an article in The Lancet was defective legislation.
The NT law requires a psychiatrist to have 'confirmed that the patient is not suffering from a treatable clinical depression in respect of the illness' before a medical practitioner is allowed to administer the lethal injection. Nitschke and his co-author stated:
Confirmation was not easy since patients perceived such a mandatory assessment as a hurdle to be overcome. [Philip Nitschke] understood that every patient held that view. To what extent was the psychiatrist trusted with important data and able to build an appropriate alliance that permitted a genuine understanding of a patient's plight?
Some senators were concerned to learn that Dr Nitschke had personally paid the fee for the psychiatric assessment of one of the patients he euthanased.
So now we have a hung parliament and Brown wants to agitate the issue of euthanasia once again. There are three distinct issues.
First, the 1995 Northern Territory law is a bad law even for those who favour euthanasia with appropriate safeguards. So before any other step is taken the Northern Territory parliament should repeal the 1995 law, so we can start with a blank slate.
Second, since 1997 the legislatures of the Northern