Editorial: Not the environment first, just death

A fortnight ago this editorial argued that the highest priorities for the Greens and associated environmental activists following the recent federal election would not be the environment but completely different issues such as the redefinition of marriage.
That column could well have added the words ‘and euthanasia’ as well. The following weekend, while the country was still waiting to see who would form the next federal government, The Weekend Australian newspaper’s front page headline was ‘Greens push same-sex laws.’ It took no particular prescience to know what kinds of issues the Greens would move on first, only a clear understanding that children can swing in a moment from sweetness to viciousness.
In political terms the Greens are the childish nightmare of Australian life, literally. Although they loudly proclaim themselves as the only defenders of the environment, as a political party they have rapidly become the foremost foe of human life. Their philosophy begins with a good intention: the awareness that we can’t treat the earth as we do, hence their growing political success and influence. But it arrives at a subsequent embarrassment about human beings who they regard (and portray) as sucking creation dry. This simplistic and unscientific premise (human beings cause environmental damage, therefore human beings must be bad) has become a hallmark of their whole political approach and it is this, not their position on environmental issues, that is the real and sinister problem of the Greens.
While they ceaselessly proclaim their own importance and their own solutions as the only ones that are acceptable they consistently campaign primarily for the ending of human life in an ever-widening definition of categories of people who can be done away with, presumably in order to make our lives a little easier and to make us less taxing as a species on the environment. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the looming State parliamentary debate, moved by Greens Upper House member Robin Chapple in an attempt to have euthanasia legalised in WA.
If Mr Chapple is to succeed in having the killing of the elderly, the sick, the very young and the disabled legalised, which is what euthanasia has become wherever it is legalised (inquirers, please check the Netherlands) he will only be able to do so by obscuring for the community, for journalists seeking to dissect the issues and state legislators the one distinction that makes his legislation redundant: that between palliative care and its associated pain control on the one hand, and euthanasia on the other.
What is the distinction? Palliative Care is the  medical approach to caring for the terminally ill which is devoted to giving every individual the best possible quality of life up until and including the moment of death. When pain relief is provided to someone suffering a terminal illness and an unintended consequence of this is that death is hastened, no euthanasia has occurred. Most critically for the euthanasia debate palliative care is able to guarantee that no individual with a terminal illness needs to die in any pain at any time and this assertion is confidently backed by oncologists and palliative care specialists the world over.
Euthanasia is completely different. It is the decision, taken with or without the consent of an individual suffering from depression or illness, terminal or otherwise, to end that person’s life. In WA the euthanasia proposed by Mr Chapple is the form which depends (but only for the time being) on consent of the person who is to die.
The danger is obvious. The moment such a law is passed, euthanasia becomes immediately prone to manipulation by any one or more of the numerous parties connected to the process of dying. It also reveals how fraught with danger is the position of the individual who is dying, already in a weakened state and prone to pressure from any of those surrounding them. Legalisation of euthanasia creates a legal and moral nightmare for patients, the terminally ill, medical practitioners, hospital administrators and the legal system. It is, in a real sense, exactly the human and moral mess that the Greens are so predictable at creating.
It is also exactly the sort of mess which easily morphs into situations where others begin to decide when the vulnerable will die.
The distinction between palliative care and euthanasia is the crux of the issue which those in WA’s Parliament who oppose euthanasia must communicate with limpid clarity to their colleagues. When the all-important difference (that hastened death as an unintended consequence of pain relief is not euthanasia and is morally acceptable) is made clear, support for euthanasia becomes redundant.
In fact, because the euthanasia lobby, including the Greens, has confused the issue by Disneyfying and sentimentalising the debate an additional obstacle that now needs to be overcome by euthanasia’s opponents is that many people now confuse the two things. If those opposed to Mr Chapple’s Bill can clarify what the fundamental difference between the two is, Mr Chapple’s Bill will rightly collapse.
On every occasion that has arisen in Australian state and federal politics, Greens have voted to widen the legal definition of who can be done away with. In this regard their record is consistently anti-human and appallingly ignorant. The gaping weakness in their outlook is that while the environment is sacrosanct they are prepared to facilitate at every turn the process of doing away with people. Their philosophy and policies in relations to human beings make them the intellectual lightweights of Australian politics, but it would not be the first time in history that such uninformed children have gone on to do such awful, thoroughly terrible collateral damage to those around them.