Professor Roderick MacLeod:

I can respond to that. People are very often coerced into having treatments that they do not want. Non-beneficial treatment costs the Australian and New Zealand healthcare system hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Families have pushed for people to have treatment which is essentially futile and in many ways, that increases the person's physical suffering.

To go back to the Deputy's other comments about the nature of suffering, surprisingly in the field of medicine, which is supposed to relieve suffering, there is remarkably little research into the nature of suffering but there is some good work being done at the University of Sydney. As I said earlier, what we know is that it is rarely consistent. If patients are expressing their suffering to their family, their family will often support them and may even push them to seek a way out and yet that suffering can be relieved, although not always, as the Deputy pointed out. It cannot always be relieved but it can always be changed. That is the thing. If you have a stone in your shoe and you keep walking on it because you cannot get rid of it, what you will do is move it. That is part of the nature of suffering.

If the committee is serious about wanting to use this legislation to alleviate suffering, then it has to have a very clear understanding of what suffering is. It is not just what one might think it is; one has to look at the evidence. Writers like Eric Cassell from America and Megan Best from Sydney tell us that suffering is not as simple as it may seem.