Professor Ben White:

I will begin with the point the Senator made about transparency in the approach I take. I outlined the values I think are important in the debate and I also made clear to the committee my involvement and the work I have done. As the Senator correctly said, everyone has a position on this, including everyone here today, and I have tried to be transparent about that.

On the topic of whether the vulnerable are more likely to use voluntary assisted dying, as I mentioned, I followed the evidence on it. For example, a paper published in 2016 by a group of authors who have different views on voluntary assisted dying reviewed all the evidence in Europe, Canada and the US and found that vulnerable people were not more likely to use voluntary assisted dying. That paper, which analysed all the evidence available at the time, was published in an internationally recognised peer reviewed journal. That was part of the evidence I used to reach that conclusion.