Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

Andrew Denton wants to liberalise Australia’s assisted suicide laws further, but the Dutch experience raises serious questions about where voluntary assisted dying (VAD) ultimately leads and who will be affected.

Australia’s most polished lobbyist for voluntary assisted dying (VAD) is Andrew Denton, the founder of Go Gentle Australia and a former ABC journalist.  

The best word to describe him is sharp: his wardrobe is sharp, his mind is sharp, his tongue is sharp, his words are sharp. So when he maps out the future of VAD, you can be sure that it will be sharp, razor-sharp.  

Which is exactly what happened at the National Press Club last month, ten years after the launch of his organisation. 

In those ten years, Australia has gone from a total ban on VAD to total legalisation. But Denton is far from proclaiming “mission accomplished”. He has an agenda. 

At the top of the list is removing the ban on telehealth VAD. The ALP National Conference endorsed this earlier this year, although it has still to be debated in Federal Parliament.  

The second is access to VAD for people with dementia. Denton acknowledges that this is a tricky area, as the “V” in VAD stands for “voluntary” — and how can doctors know if a request to die made by a demented person is truly voluntary? Sharp as he is, Denton will find a way.  

The third is “institutional obstruction” by hospitals and aged care centres which will not permit VAD on their premises. Catholic institutions are the most notorious hold-outs. They can’t say that they haven’t been warned.  

He mentioned other ways in which VAD laws need to be liberalised.  

“Gag clauses” which ban doctors from discussing VAD with patients must be scrapped. Residency requirements which ban out-of-staters from seeking VAD must be scrapped. “Arbitrary timeframes” for eligibility must be scrapped. 

VAD should be treated as legitimate end-of-life care, he said, not as suicide. VAD doctors should be respected and adequately remunerated.  

“Ten years from now, I hope to describe a country where VAD is no longer stigmatised,” Denton told the National Press Club.  

A country, that is, which looks a lot like the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal since 2002.

The Dutch Model Is Not What Australians Think

Denton has long been a fan of how the Dutch handle euthanasia. It’s completely voluntary, carefully regulated, and widely supported – a model for Australia. Or so he says. 

But euthanasia in the Netherlands would astonish most Australians. Babies up to the age of 12 months can be euthanised. Strictly speaking this is not legal, but if the doctors and parents agree, the police will not prosecute.  

Children between 1 and 16 years old can be euthanised. Patients with severe dementia can be euthanised if they had written an explicit advance directive while still competent. Patients with psychiatric disorders who have no underlying physical terminal illness can be euthanised.  

The percentage of euthanasia deaths in the Netherlands is rising steadily. In 2021 it was 4.5 per cent; in 2025 it was 6.0 per cent.  

Since euthanasia was legalised in 2002, only one Dutch doctor has ever been criminally prosecuted – and he was acquitted. With all due respect to the medical profession, a 100 per cent innocence rate is utterly implausible, especially since a significant portion of euthanasia cases are not reported to the authorities.  

A Former Regulator Sounds the Alarm

No one speaks with greater authority on Dutch euthanasia than ethicist Theo de Boer. From 2005 to 2014, he worked for his country’s euthanasia regulators and reviewed some 4,000 cases. Now he is a trenchant critic.  

“Here is my prediction,” he informed a committee of the UK Parliament in 2023: “any law that allows assisted dying will come to be experienced as an injustice and will be challenged in the courts.” Assisted dying for dementia, mental illness, and loneliness will inevitably expand.  

“There is not one jurisdiction in the world with some form of legal assisted dying where the practice over the years did not expand into a direction (both in terms of numbers and in terms of pathologies) that was neither originally envisaged by the lawmakers, nor was part of the original campaigns towards legalisation,” de Boer wrote. “There is merely a difference in speed.”  

And we all have a stake in euthanasia debates, de Boer believes – not just the elderly and ill. It will subtly change how we treat each other. 

“Legal assistance in dying may influence a culture in ways similar to how smartphones have impacted friendships, journalism, the economy, and even people’s self-understanding,” he said. 

“It pushes us in the direction of despair, in which death is increasingly seen as a serious solution for enduring and irresolvable care-dependence, loneliness, ageing, and meaninglessness.”  

Is this the ultimate destination on Andrew Denton’s map? A future in which death will be the solution to all suffering?

___

Republished with thanks to The Catholic Weekly. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.