Professor Ben White:

May I pick up on the consent issue the Senator raised? Maybe other witnesses can comment on the other issues. I would include that as part of eligibility criteria: making decisions with capacity, being informed and being able to make those decisions.

One of the things which is different about Australia is the mandatory requirement for all practitioners who are providing voluntary assisted dying to undertake state-approved training. There is specific training on consent and detection of coercion, among other things. In some of the interviews we have done with doctors, they have actually said the conversations they have had about voluntary assisted dying made them realise that, even though they had been practising as doctors for 20 years, they were not doing informed consent. They were just going through the motions, but having done this and really stepped through that deep decision-making process with their patients, a number of them said they now really understood informed consent.