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... have a weekend edition of "The Age" or "The Sydney Morning Herald" at home, worth taking a look at the international section. There's a well penned article by yours truly in there ;-)
Comments
There are solid arguments on both sides, so it's not a tough one. At the end of the day though, governments legislating death is a big call. Whether it is the death penalty for crime, or euthanasia, it is still government making the ultimate decision.
Good luck submitting to Fairfax though RJ. They like a particular 'flavour' to their reporting.
Didn't seem to excite that much interest. There was of course some debate about the cognitive ability of young people to make these kinds of decisions, but it was not mainstream, so it fizzled out. I did find it somewhat shocking that something like 1% of all deaths in Belgium came about through interventions.
For some reason, euthanasia and gay marriage just don't hold the public's attention here for any length of time. Gay marriage for example, which should be one of those issues that polarise the political left and right, don't arouse passions in anyone other than the religiously fervent, and the anarchically dogmatic. Tony Abbott is a big-C conservative and is against it, but the left doesn't go after him for it. It pays to remember that in Australia the Liberals (conservatives)will always be against gay marriage and euthanasia because they are changes to the status quo and doing 'what's right', but they face no real opposition in politics because the Labour party has its roots in working class Catholicism. Anytime someone tries to fire up these topics, they just don't get much political support and die a natural death (I'm afraid that was an intended pun).
Unfortunately, any news item in regard to boatpeople, queue-jumpers, refugees, asylum seekers, call them what your bias dictates, will throb and pulse in the news endlessly and breathlessly. If you want to make some money freelancing on a subject that has no end of arguments and political point-scoring, do that one. We have even managed under the new government to make this issue one of democratic freedoms. Not the rights of the asylum seekers mind you (though their rights are frequently heading towards the high court), but rather the right of the public to know versus the (so-called) need of the government to withhold information from the public domain that relates to national security. As I said, no end of angles on this story.