Adding voice to plea for death

Plea for a permitted death (July 31) submitted to Parliament outlines the same tired old arguments against euthanasia.

Submissions against the bill include lack of consideration for the sanctity of life. Well, we don’t seem to worry about that in time of war. And abortion is legal.

Another submission refers to the doctors’ oath of doing no harm. If a person is suffering terribly and doesn’t wish to be kept alive, isn’t it doing harm to make them endure their suffering when the end is inevitable? Logically, to grant a person’s wish to die can’t be seen as harming them – it’s their stated wish. If pain can’t be alleviated – and it seems that in Roslyn Metcalfe’s case she could suffer unbearably for decades – keeping her alive would be medically harming her.

‘‘Compassion means to suffer with,’’ says one submitter. Well, yes, maybe, if that submitter also has a terminal illness or one like Metcalfe’s.

I wonder just how many submitters have a terminal or incapacitating illness? It’s so easy to ‘‘suffer with’’ somebody if one does not have to face such an illness oneself.

Finally I would say that I have no right to insist that terminally ill people can or cannot go into palliative care, so why should a minority group with outdated views have the right to insist that I cannot choose euthanasia.

Carol Worthington, Stokes Valley

Kill the bill

Your minimal coverage of Parliament’s select committee hearings into submissions regarding the End of Life Choice bill does not surprise me.

Submitters warning of the dangers of this bill and the wide variety of sound reasons why it should be abandoned outnumber those in favour by at least 10 to 1, but these were given scant attention.

While it is agreed that a comparatively small number New Zealanders face stressful health conditions, it is dangerous to enact laws permitting killing them, which is the bottom line in David Seymour’s bill, no matter how it is ‘‘dressed up’’.

The experience from overseas jurisdictions which have gone down the track being promoted in this bill is that it is impossible to legislate for just a little bit of killing.

Sooner or later, we are all at risk. The only responsible action for Parliament is to kill this bill, once and for all.

Philip Lynch, Upper Hutt [abridged]

Time to strike

One should not be surprised if we start seeing an increasing number of calls for fairer pay supported by strike action amongst the public sector, spreading to the private sector.

Profits have become a larger share of gross domestic product (GDP), with growth snatched from shrinking wages and salaries. The ratio of wages to GDP has been steadily declining from about 50 per cent in the 1960s to about 42 per cent today.

As a result, the median worker has experienced no growth in real wages since about 1980. There is further evidence that corporates have reached the peak of their profitearning cycle, having extracted the maximum possible dollar from the productivity pie.

Rising popularism and an increasingly disenchanted workforce are huge challenges that may well rip apart the traditional corporate model unless executives start thinking intelligently about narrowing the gap between a board and its average worker pay.

Executives have only themselves to blame, along with weak, ineffective, sycophantic, institutional shareholders, and investment managers who fail to take an activist approach when one is sorely needed.

Guy Dobson, Levin [abridged]

Lesson from past

Racism is alive and kicking in Aotearoa New Zealand (Cannabis offences down, P on the rise, July 30). The Drug Foundation’s Ross Bell, when referring to the mild form of punishment of ‘‘diversion’’, said: ‘‘But I would note that not all districts use diversion as much as others, and that Ma¯ ori are still more likely to be prosecuted and convicted than others.’’

Have our policemen and women not heard of, much less read, Harper Lee’s book To Kill a Mockingbird? It was about civil rights and racism in the segregated southern United States in the 1930s. An innocent negro boy was convicted of a trumped-up charge. Colour is only skin deep.

Brian Collins, Aro Valley