SAVES is not affiliated with Exit International / Dr Philip Nitschke and opposes the public availability of a 'peaceful pill'.

Whatever happened to progress in South Australia? The Social Development Committee, a parliamentary committee which was looking into the 1996 Euthanasia Bill, has simply tossed it out saying that more resources should be put into palliative care. What a cop-out.

Of course more resources should be put into palliative care. Blind Freddy knows that, although the government, which has immense difficulty getting its human priorities right, is busy closing hospital wards and cutting back while palliative care organisations are scratching around asking the community for cash to help in their work.

This is absolutely disgraceful.

It shows the moral hypocrisy not only of our Government but also our society. The fuss is minimal. Then again, this society of ours is very bad at dealing with death in any shape or form. We are so scared of death that we would pretend that it was a non-issue. So our wonderful hospices have to devote huge time and resources to fund - raising campaigns and must depend upon the loving goodwill of volunteers to keep their work adequately staffed.

I think, of course, of Daw House Hospice of the Southern Hospice Foundation and also of Mary Potter ... both of them struggling to keep afloat and, at the same time, giving the dying people in their charge a sense of comfort and dignity.

Hospices are truly beautiful, gentle places. And there is a certain grace to be found in the process of dying. Or there can be, if it is enabled by circumstances.

These hospices strive to have community presence, to have staff to attend to the terminally ill in their homes, as well as in the hospice context. But it all costs - and the money is not forthcoming.

So the Social Development Committee has a point. But its point is made by way of ducking the other issue of dying ... which is choice.

I find it sickeningly ironic that people who espouse "right to life" also deny "right to death".

This parliamentary committee, chaired by Liberal MP Caroline Schaefer, has said that it has no objection to allowing people to die by having treatment withheld but it cannot swallow the "fundamental problem" of lethal injection because of the Biblical principle of "thou shalt not kill".

Hell, that principle never stopped soldiers.

Why should it stop compassionate cessation of life for those whose quality of life has degenerated to the unbearable and for whom there is no relief in sight?

It seems that despite 12 months of consideration, the committee, like so many people blinded by religion, cannot comprehend that euthanasia in not carte blanche to knock off auntie but is only applicable at auntie's request. No one is knocking off anyone. It is assisted suicide for those whose bodily functions have turned into torment and for whom the state of consciousness is a state of helpless suffering. It is their choice. No one else's.

Former Labor MP Anne Levy understood this when she introduced the Euthanasia Bill, and it was hoped at the time, with polls indicating a high degree of public support for the concept of choice in death, that South Australia may recover some of its Dunstan Decade reputation for progress and enlightenment with this Bill. But the pollies are timid. They passed the buck and called it "social development".

Two dissenting members of the committee have suggested that the public should decide. That would be a fine thing. Progressive even. Which is why it will never happen.

Nope. Those days are gone. We are the backwater state with the conservative values.

So long as we cannot deal with death, either in funding its palliative requirements or in giving the dying the one last dignity of choice - we can proudly boast that we are simply dead end.

Vale hope!

This article originally appeared in The Advertiser, Friday October 22, 1999 and was reprinted in the SAVES Newsletter with kind permission of the author.