by PAUL COLLITS – A QUEENSLAND man has been found to have (successfully) taken his wife’s Voluntary Assisted Dying pills after she had died without the chance to use them.
At first, before I read the details, I had assumed this case might have been a matter of mistaken pill identity. Could you pass me the Panamax, love? Oops! Wrong box. But no, he meant to do it.
- Saying “no” over and over in the face of a cultural steamroller that carries with it “the vibe” is a tough gig.
- Once the initial platform is set, things only ever move in one direction.
- We are fighting a psychological battle, not an intellectual one.
I guess, like guns, you should register these VAD pills and lock them securely in the pill cupboard. Or keep the password to yourself.
It had to happen sooner or later.
I wrote in 2021 at Quadrant, reviewing John Fleming’s masterful and sobering book on euthanasia, To Kill or Not to Kill: Euthanasia in a Society with a Cultural Death Wish: “A tsunami of culture-of-death legislation is rolling across the increasingly unfruited plain that is modern-day Australia.
PERSUADED
“Parliament by parliament, our elected representatives have massively expanded the ‘Overton Window’ – the range of policies which the electorate can be persuaded to accept – in relation to issues concerning the ethics of the taking of life
“The next stops are Queensland and NSW, where draft bills to introduce euthanasia – or to give it the name much preferred by its adherents, “voluntary assisted dying” – are shortly to be considered. We mustn’t use words like killing or suicide in this context, of course.”
I also noted that: “According to Queensland Health, ‘Voluntary assisted dying allows a person who is suffering and dying from a life limiting condition to choose the timing and circumstances of their death’. Yes, the Queensland health bureaucracy is promoting suicide!
One after another Australian State and Territory has rolled out VAD laws, aka mercy killing or euthanasia.
To great fanfare and much cheering from the death cult. Led by Alex Greenwich (inevitably) and friends. Progressive types, all.
We all saw many things coming from the initial VAD push. Younger people. People who are not actually dying. People in pain. People feeling a bit down. But not this!
Perhaps “grief” needs to be added to the lengthy and growing list of VAD triggers.
These days the Queensland Health Minister is called Shannon Fentiman. Like most ALP politicians, she is a she and looks about twenty-five.
She took over recently from Yvette Death (as she is fondly known). They did a job swap, Attorney General for Health. Shannon is going to “look into” the VAD laws.
According to The Guardian… “Queensland’s health minister has suggested the State may need to strengthen voluntary assisting dying (VAD) legislation after a woman’s euthanasia drugs were used by her husband after she died in hospital.
ASSISTED
“The coroner is investigating the reported incident, in which the elderly woman was approved to use the drugs at home under Queensland’s voluntary assisted dying scheme – but she died suddenly in hospital. Her husband subsequently used the drugs to kill himself.”
Under the Queensland scheme, VAD patients are required to send their drugs back after 14 days if they are not used.
Killing yourself is proving popular in the Sunshine State. The Partly Cloudy State, perhaps.
Its VAD Review Board found that 499 eligible Queenslanders had applied to die under the scheme, with 34 applicants ruled ineligible. VAD patients ranged in age from 26 to 95, but the median age was 73. It said 245 people used the process to die, with the bulk of them having cancer.
But if only more people knew about VAD in Queensland, more could die!
The president of Dying with Dignity Qld, Sheila Sim, recently said the group had heard no complaints about the scheme in its first year.
PROBLEM
She said the biggest problem for the State’s VAD laws was that not enough people knew about them.
Get out there and sell this harder, Sheila! Do better.
When the VAD laws were passed in 2021, while Qld and other Australian politicians were letting people die from COVID due as a result of their decision to ban effective treatments that weren’t “vaccines”, the peripatetic, unspellable Premier up north was impressed:
“Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk paid tribute to members of parliament for the dignified manner in which the bill was debated and the historic conscience vote that enabled it to pass,” it was reported at the time.
“This is a deeply personal matter and we have heard the moving stories that prompted members to vote in the way they have,” the Premier said.
“We got to this point after years of consultation with the people of this State and expert advice.
“It was not rushed. Queenslanders will now have a choice that I know many families wish they had.”
Well, we know that the bloke whose wife died was happy he had the choice. And the wife’s drugs handy. Talk about a significant breakthrough for the VAD adjacent.
When these sorts of things happen, it is always wise to put “the Netherlands euthanasia” into your preferred search engine, just to see where the world is going with culture-of-death developments. Belgium is another bellwether.
Sure enough, we have this: “Ernst Kuipers, the Dutch health minister, recently announced that regulations were being modified to allow doctors to actively end the lives of children aged one to 12 years who were terminally ill and suffering unbearably.
“Previously, assisted dying was an option in the Netherlands in rare cases in younger children (under one year) and in some older teenagers who requested voluntary euthanasia. Until now, Belgium was the only country in the world to allow assisted dying in children under 12.”
Once the initial platform is set, things only ever move in one direction. Subsequent liberalisations make liars of the original proponents who typically use words like “conservative” and “dignity” and “safe”.
ENGAGED
It never, ever lasts, as humans who are fully engaged in Eve’s sin of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge are always seeking to assume more and more power.
What a stuff-up it has been in Queensland. These goon-legislators are playing with fire. Assuming power over life and death and pretending it is all in a leaderly day’s work. Did someone say “slippery slope”?
Meanwhile the battle over life issues goes on: “…we have an array of celebrities driving the debates and watching the dominoes fall. For decades, Australia’s own Dr Death, Philip Nitschke, carried the baton.
“Now we have the ABC’s Andrew Denton, who has been scurrying all over the nation proselytising in support of the aged-suicidal.
They have the usual high-profile voices internationally to support them, like those of Hugh Grant, Patrick Stewart and Stephen Hawking. Their arguments are cleverly designed to pull at the heartstrings
“Just like the same-sex-marriage argument – if it can be called that – that “love is love”. The task of resistance, then, involves hard work and is not for the faint-hearted.”
Saying “no” over and over in the face of a cultural steamroller that carries with it “the vibe” and the progressive illusion of inevitability but not much else is a tough gig.
The insults and abuse (not to mention death threats) that have recently led Jacinta Price to seek and obtain police protection, all just for saying “no” to a cockamamie scheme dreamt up by Albo and a few of his Aboriginal industry mates, is a salutary reminder of the costs incurred by those who speak out.
Just ask RFK Jr. He has to employ his own security detail since Joe Biden won’t give him Secret Service help.
HEARTS
On strategies for resistance to the zeitgeist, Julius Ruechel argues: “Data plays an important role in changing hearts and minds, but only as a secondary ingredient. We are fighting a psychological battle, not an intellectual one.
“Data will help those who start to ask questions, but first they need to ask their first question. First there needs to be a seed of doubt. Data will not plant that seed of doubt. Data does not have the power to break the spell.
“To plant a seed of doubt, to help people take that first step, it is not what you say that matters so much as being seen to say it, out loud, in public, in a way that allows you to be identified and counted, and being willing to face the music when the world can see what you really think.
“And saying it over and over again, relentlessly, until enough voices join in, until the counter chorus can no longer be dismissed as fringe. Doubt is created by breaking the illusion of consensus.” [emphasis in original.]
Hearts and then minds. And with persistent public witness. Ruechel was speaking about COVID tyranny here, but his argument is germane to all sorts of vibe-driven public policy debates.
Perhaps cases such as that of the poor VAD man in Qld might just strike enough people as ludicrous and amoral to start them thinking. And speaking out. Publicly and often. And not simply assuming that when deadly legislation passes, it is “game over” for the “no” case. The game must never be over.PC
