Andrew Denton,director of Go Gentle Australia,was in the chamber as the Senate voted. He said it would be worth revisiting the nation’s residency requirements once all states and territories have voluntary assisted dying laws.
“It seems to me to be an uncontroversial fix,” he said.
“It won’t make it easier for anyone to access these laws. They’re not easy to access,period,but it just removes a level of bureaucracy that won’t be necessary once it’s national.”
Tara Cheyne,Human Rights Minister for the ACT,said a residency requirement had made sense when Victoria became the first state to legalise euthanasia in June 2019.
But given Canberra is surrounded by NSW,and residents of both jurisdictions use the health systems interchangeably,it made sense to look at whether residency restrictions were necessary.
“Do we need to have safeguards? Absolutely. But we don’t need unnecessary barriers that don’t really have any meaning to them. And so that’s the balance that we need to strike,” she said.