Dr. Simon Mills:

I would like to make an observation, although it is not really in reply to the Senator's comments. It is something that arose from what Deputy Farrell said. Lots of the principles for what it means to have capacity to consent to something are reasonably well established. The tests are well established legally. I mention this in case it does not come up in reply to any other questions. Two issues need to be built into the committee's consideration. First, although alternatives should be discussed and resourced, nothing about resourcing palliative care or anything else changes the law in terms of a person with capacity preferring to refuse palliative care and adopt the route of assisted dying.

Professor Huxtable may disagree with this but I do not think so to judge from his body language. It is important to point out that when we state all of those alternatives must be present, they must be present for the choices afforded the person considering assisted dying to be meaningful. That is not the same as saying those choices must be adopted as a precursor. A complicated question, which Mr. Kelly touched on earlier, is the issue of capacity at the time of exercising one's right to assisted dying. That is something the committee should come back to. It is the question of whether advance directives have any role to play here, and how a right to assisted dying is going to be tied into the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act 2015 and whether decision-making representatives and other such persons have a role to play. That is something the committee needs to come back to, and is a conversation I would be happy to help with.