Right-to-die law lost in narrow vote

By HELEN TUNNAH, deputy political editor

Politicians have rejected a proposed new law which would have given people with terminal or incurable illnesses the right to die.

The Death With Dignity Bill failed to cross its first hurdle in Parliament last night, when it was defeated at the first reading by 60 votes to 57 in a conscience vote for MPs.

One MP abstained and two did not vote.

The bill would have allowed the seriously ill to ask a doctor to help them die. But even if it had been eventually passed by Parliament, voluntary euthanasia would not have become law until it was supported by a majority of New Zealand voters in a referendum.

New Zealand First MP Peter Brown, the architect of the bill, said last night that he was shattered.

"The politicians have let the people of New Zealand down. I'm pretty brassed off."

MPs eight years ago also defeated plans for voluntary euthanasia, and it is expected to be years before another attempt is made to legalise it.

Mr Brown cannot put forward another bill at least until after the next election.

He said last night that MPs should have been trying to help those who were suffering, and by voting not to let the bill be scrutinised by the public at a select committee had been hugely disappointing.

"I think it's reprehensible they just dismissed it, and said 'well go away and do whatever you like, suffer in silence'."

He had earlier spoken in Parliament during an emotional debate on the proposal, watched by his second wife, Lynley, and "right to die" campaigner Lesley Martin, who faces criminal charges over the death of her terminally ill mother.

A visibly stressed Mr Brown told the Herald before the debate that he supported a law change partly because he had watched his first wife, Vera, die from cancer.

"She was as fit as a fiddle, I'd never known her sick.

"By the end she really pleaded with me, not for me to kill her, but she really pleaded with me that she's got to go.

"She left two teenagers, one barely a teenager. You never forget that ... you never get over it."

He had also been asked by a Christchurch tetraplegic to change the laws, but had written back saying it was against his Christian beliefs.

"I felt awful, I felt guilty and I felt I was not doing the job that I was meant to do."

In Parliament last night he asked Christians to support the bill reaching the select committee for scrutiny.

"Don't let your faith blind your compassion," he said.

National party leader Bill English had spoken strongly against legalising voluntary euthanasia.

He said it cheapened the sanctity of life, and the bill was about providing comfort for the healthy not the sick.

"This bill is a comfort for the living, not a ticket for those who want to die," he said.

"This is always how the argument arises, it's 'I' feel the stress, that 'I' want death with dignity, because it gives 'me' discomfort to watch the pain. Well pain is part of life and watching it is part of our humanity, and many of us have become more human for having watched it, whether we liked it or not."

Act MP Rodney Hide said people should be given the right to end suffering if they wanted.

Former GP Lynda Scott, National health spokeswoman, said she had seen many patients die, sometimes slowly, and had seen elderly people talk about dying because they worried they were a burden. It was going too far to give doctors the opportunity to help a person die.

"When you are saying it is ethical for a doctor to take a life, you are crossing a line."