As MSP Liam McArthur continues to urge Holyrood to adopt his “Australian-style” assisted suicide system, it is essential to look beyond campaign slogans and examine what that model has actually produced. Australia is routinely presented as evidence that assisted suicide can be introduced safely, sparingly, and without unintended consequences. The lived reality across Australian states and territories tells a far darker story.
Let’s take a peek at what lies in Scotland’s future, were MSPs to choose assisted suicide…
1. Assisted suicide becomes a substitute for quality care
One of the clearest lessons from Australia is that assisted suicide does not arrive alongside improved care. It fills the void where care has failed.
In Queensland, 71-year-old Tony Lewis, diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease, has chosen assisted suicide after being denied adequate disability funding. Because he was diagnosed after the age of 65, Lewis was excluded from the National Disability Insurance Scheme and instead placed in the aged care system, which is widely acknowledged to be ill-equipped for fast-progressing neurological disease.
Lewis wants to go on living, but his financial situation makes it impossible. His decision is driven not by despair at life itself, but by the impossibility of accessing sufficient support to live with dignity. His wife is now his primary carer, shouldering an overwhelming burden with minimal professional help.
This is not autonomy. It is coercion by neglect.
2. An exponential rise in assisted suicides
Supporters of assisted suicide frequently insist that usage will remain low (just as abortion proponents in the 1960s did). Australian data demolishes that claim.
In South Australia, more than 110 people died through voluntary assisted dying in its first year. The following year saw deaths rise to around 250. In New South Wales, where voluntary assisted dying became legal in late 2023, the second annual report recorded 1,028 deaths in a single twelve-month period, an average of 20 deaths per week.
This represents a dramatic increase from the previous six-month reporting period, which recorded 398 deaths. Once the law beds in, numbers rise quickly and consistently. There is no evidence of stabilisation.
In every jurisdiction where assisted suicide is legalised, initial reassurances about limited use collapse under the weight of the reality of a culture of death.
3. Young and non-terminal patients are drawn into the system
Another persistent myth is that assisted suicide is strictly confined to those who are clearly dying. Australia again provides a sobering correction.
In South Australia, 25-year-old Annaliese Holland was approved for voluntary assisted dying after years of chronic illness. While media reports often describe her as condition as terminal, her case illustrates a far more troubling reality. Holland’s condition involved severe disability, chronic pain, and repeated medical crises, but it did not fit the ordinary understanding of terminal illness as imminent and unavoidable death. Her approval rested largely on subjective assessments of suffering and quality of life, rather than a clearly defined end-of-life prognosis. She herself described assisted suicide as a “safety blanket”, an option that brought psychological relief simply by existing.
Assisted suicide always becomes a response to suffering rather than dying, so age and prognosis cease to function as meaningful safeguards.
4. Safeguards are steadily weakened, not strengthened
Continuing in that vein, Australian experience shows that safeguards always erode over time.
In Victoria, legislators removed the prohibition on doctors initiating conversations about assisted suicide by a huge margin: 26 to 14. They also compelled conscientious objectors to provide information about the practice to patients and reduced assessment requirements for patients with neurodegenerative conditions.
In the Australian Capital Territory, eligibility does not require a specific terminal timeframe at all. Also, nurses may act as assisted dying practitioners.
Even more tellingly, on the very day the ACT scheme came into force, the Canberra Times reported that campaigners were already calling for the law to be expanded further. Less than 24 hours into the death regime campaigners were already unhappy that not enough people were able to be coerced into death, calling for an expansion for people with dementia and other non-terminal conditions.
Once killing becomes a medical option, campaigners inevitably argue that excluding certain groups is discriminatory. The goal is fully elective death.
5. Palliative care is sidelined as assisted suicide accelerates
Far from strengthening palliative care, assisted suicide thrives where such care is weakest.
In New South Wales, proposals have emerged to cut postgraduate palliative care courses at one of Australia’s leading universities, despite acknowledged workforce shortages. At the same time, voluntary assisted dying deaths have surged, particularly in rural areas where access to hospice care is limited.
Medical professionals have repeatedly warned that when pain management, counselling, and end-of-life support are unavailable, patients are more likely to request assisted suicide. Death becomes the most accessible intervention.
This is not a coincidence. It is a system responding to scarcity with elimination.
6. Justice can be evaded the easy way
The most chilling illustration of Australia’s assisted suicide regime is the case of Daniel Hume in New South Wales.
Hume, a convicted paedophile serving a 30-year sentence for serious sexual offences against multiple victims, became the first prisoner in the state to die under its voluntary assisted dying law. Diagnosed with terminal cancer after serving just seven years of his sentence, Hume’s application was approved by the Voluntary Assisted Dying Board without consultation with victims, prison authorities, or senior ministers.
Disturbingly, reports indicate that Hume kept photographs of his victims while in custody, which he displayed next to him as he died. As his death was authorised quietly, his victims were not informed in advance.
His daughter and victim, Nevaeh Jett, learned of his death through a media report. She has since spoken publicly about feeling robbed of justice, stating that while palliative care is a basic human right, assisted suicide should not be used to erase a sentence imposed by the courts.
Assisted dying was never sold to the public as a mechanism for prematurely ending prison sentences. Yet in practice, it has allowed the state to replace punishment and accountability with an easy exit.
Does that sound like a Scotland you want?
Liam McArthur heralds his Bill as being akin to the Australian model. If that were the case then Scottish legislators should, without hesitation, kill the Bill.
SPUC’s Executive Director, Michael Robinson, says, “Australia’s assisted suicide laws have widened rapidly, normalised death as a response to suffering and social failure, weakened safeguards, sidelined care, and even undermined the justice system itself. Scotland must have its eyes opened; Australia’s experience is not one of careful restraint but of relentless expansion and unintended harm. SPUC will fight to prevent this becoming a reality for Scotland every day, and calls for a compassionate, caring, and just country in which every person is given the dignity they deserve to the point of natural death.”
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