As a country with a rapidly aging population we face these challenges:
- aging population
- lower birth rate
- not enough young taxpayers to look after the old
- huge old-age welfare bill
- potentially long term imbalance of size of health care industry to cater for the current aged (with a build-out of infrastructure that may be useless to us in the future)
- policies being geared to attract votes of older people

One thing I see is that the aged - even the mentally incompetent - are allowed to vote. Clearly, these aged people are a voting force and the major parties are going to do whatever it takes to keep them voting. Should the minimum voting age be decreased as a compensating effect?

The question is - should we be spending money on life-extension therapies? If we could spend $100,000 per head to give people vat-grown new organs should we do so? Should we allow the electorate to determine this or will politicians do it for us? Should my freedom to earn money and spend it how I wish be compromised so I can pay higher taxes to look after the old?

Also, as average life-expectancy raises should we be raising the starting age of the various old-age pensions? As women on average live longer should their starting age be higher?

There was a documentary on the other night about extending life for the elderly.  It was quite true though - you can cure one disease. but another one (often worse) tends to raise it's ugly head, because once you get to a certain age, your body begins to breakdown very quickly.  As people are living longer, and less comfortably as they get into their 80's and 90's, our crumbling health system has to cope with more of the elderly draining our dwindling health resources.

But there are 2 theories about our ageing population.  Some indicate that as people are also working longer  there won't be the numbers that the experts estimate.  On the other hand - many of us have this fear in the back of our minds through constant reminders by our government, that when we hit retirement, if we haven't the means to fully fund our retirement, we'll end up destitute in some workhouse for the elderly.

Maybe as our public services decline,  we should take a consensus on those who aren't able to pay for private health insurance and can't fully fund their retirement.  Those who run out of money by the age of 70, unless they agree to go to a charity home, can choose a painless form of euthanasia - because according to these experts, there will be no other alternative as the government won't be able to afford to look after those retirees in a few years.

Most people would choose dieing in poverty over euthanasia. We will be able to afford far more than ever before, but as always we will have to prioritise where the money goes.

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http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/GPs-undermine-right-to-refuse-treatment/2007/07/10/1183833494103.html

The right of Queenslanders to refuse life-sustaining medical treatment is being undermined by a legal excuse for doctors to ignore patients' instructions, a specialist says.

Five Australian states have enshrined in law the concept of a "living will", in which patients can leave instructions for treatment should they become incapacitated.

Legal expert Lindy Willmott, from the Queensland University of Technology, said Queensland was the only state to allow doctors to ignore a patient's instructions if they believed the instructions were inconsistent with good medical practice.

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Pope did not ask for euthanasia: doctors

http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Pope-did-not-ask-for-euthanasia-doctors/2007/09/17/1189881379759.html

Doctors assisting Pope John Paul II in his final days never suspended medical treatment and the pontiff did not ask them to do so, his personal physician said.

Pro-euthanasia activists in Italy have said the pope refused medical treatment such as artificial respiration and feeding because he wanted to be allowed to die.

The Catholic church forbids euthanasia, which has been at the centre of a heated debate in Italy in recent months.

However, the church's Catechism says medical procedures that are "burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary or disproportionate to the expected outcome" can be discontinued with the permission of the patient or family.

Renato Buzzonetti, the late pope's long time doctor, said the pontiff's last known words, "Let me go to the house of the father", should not be interpreted as if he had asked doctors to stop treating him.

"He was never left alone, without monitoring and assistance, as some people wrongly want to suggest," he said.

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Vatican rules on vegetative patients

http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Vatican-rules-on-vegetative-patients/2007/09/17/1189881417031.html

The Vatican, ruling on a debate that has divided Catholic hospitals, said it was wrong to stop administering food and water to patients in a vegetative state even if they would never regain consciousness.

In a document approved by Pope Benedict, the Vatican's doctrinal department said tube-feeding such patients presumed to be near death was "ordinary" care that should not be discontinued because the patients still had human dignity.

The document was bound to prompt further debate among bioethicists, especially in the extensive health system the Church maintains in many countries, over how far doctors should go in using the latest scientific methods to sustain life.

It reaffirmed a position taken by the late Pope John Paul in 2004 during a heated debate in the United States about ending artificial feeding for the severely brain-damaged Terri Schiavo. She was taken off her feeding tube and died in 2005.

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Euthanasia advocate arrested in NZ

http://news.smh.com.au/euthanasia-advocate-arrested-in-nz/20080131-1pb0.html

Australian euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke has described as "gruelling" his experience at a New Zealand airport where authorities arrested him and seized copies of his book on suicide.

Dr Nitschke arrived in Auckland ahead of a meeting on Monday with New Zealand's Chief Censor Bill Hastings, when he planned to resubmit the Peaceful Pill Handbook for classification.

Dr Nitschke, who also plans to conduct a series of workshops while in the country, said he had been "taken aback" by the incident.

"I have occasionally been detained ... but this is by far the most detailed and thorough and heavy encounter I have ever had with any authority," he said from his hotel in Auckland.

The handbook was originally submitted last year but was banned in June when New Zealand's Office of Film and Literature Classification gave the handbook an "objectionable" rating.

The two copies taken from him were amended versions he hoped would be approved for sale by authorities.

The handbook, which offers advice on assisted suicide, was banned in Australia last year.

Authorities also seized equipment he planned to use in demonstrations during his workshops, he said.

"It's going to mean the workshops which start tomorrow in Auckland are going to be a little bit thin on demonstration material," he said.

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Healthy have right to end life: Nitschke

http://news.smh.com.au/healthy-have-right-to-end-life-nitschke/20080204-1q0m.html

Australian euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke doubts he will be charged after a healthy woman used advice provided by his organisation to kill herself.

Nitschke insisted that healthy people of sound mind, who were mature enough, should have the right to take their own lives if that's what they wanted.

"Yes, otherwise it effectively disregards and disrespects their views," he told AAP.

He said hundreds of his group's members had committed suicide in the past decade, but only one to two per cent were in good physical health.

Some of those cases included people who had made pacts to die with loved ones who were ill, he said.

Should This French Woman Be Allowed To Die?

http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1204070853

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This is news to me - anyone know anything about this? From crikey:

Howardist hold-outs still driving "national security" agenda
Bernard Keane writes:

The Federal Government’s proposal to extend the Telecommunications Act to enable employers to monitor email usage shows that the national security state mindset that afflicted the Howard Government and its bureaucrats is alive and well under the Rudd Government.

The source of this proposal is the Attorney-General’s Department, which in recent years under Phillip Ruddock and his Secretary, Robert Cornall, has led a number of successful initiatives to curb the basic freedoms and rights of Australians in the name of public safety. They include the successive iterations of the Howard Government’s draconian anti-terrorism laws and the outrageous ban on internet discussion of euthanasia.

Cornall’s most recent effort in this vein was an attempt in December to silence judicial criticism of ASIO by complaining to the NSW Judicial Commission about Justice Michael Adams, who found that ASIO agents had kidnapped and falsely imprisoned Izhar ul-Haque. The Commission rightly binned his complaint.

Now Cornall has convinced Robert McClelland that the private sector should be deputised to spy on its employees in case they turn out to be terrorists. But only in the critical infrastructure sector, McClelland assures us - which narrows it down to good corporate citizens like Telstra, airport owners, Sydney Water, petrol companies and the banks. Phew.

As Katherine Wilson demonstrated in Crikey yesterday, the extension of snooping powers to employers is part of an ongoing co-option of the private sector into the national security state framework. In particular, the protection of "critical infrastructure" has allowed the development of a complex and highly-rewarding partnership between governments and the private sector.

The critical infrastructure protection framework is overseen by Attorney-General’s Deputy Secretary Miles Jordana – John Howard’s international adviser who was at the centre of the children overboard affair and the false weapons of mass destruction claims on the basis of which Australia joined the attack on Iraq.

The private sector, across areas such as transport, communications, IT and energy, is a willing participant in the process of establishing a system for monitoring and protecting their facilities and the public infrastructure they use, all in the name of preventing or effectively responding to terrorism. After all, the process allows companies access to government funding for the maintenance and upgrading of monitoring and information-collection systems they would otherwise have to invest in themselves, enables – in the name of greater security – the development of new regulatory requirements that raise the barriers to entry for possible competitors, and transfers an element of operational risk to taxpayers.

And all in exchange for attending a few working group meetings a year and learning several dozen acronyms (language specialists - check out this page for a particularly bad case of Bureaucratic Acronymitis).

In return, governments get compliant supporters of the absurdity of the national security state – the state that requires us to suspend our critical faculties and accept long screening queues at airports, security agents who abduct people and gaol sentences for making a joke about bombs in the wrong place.

The test for any of these national security proposals should always be what might be christened the Haneef Test: would you trust the clowns who bungled that investigation, either through malice or incompetence, with even greater powers than they already have? And in this case, even if you trusted the judgement of the Australian Federal Police or ASIO, would you trust employers with the power to monitor your communications?

McClelland has promised consultation on the proposals. He should chuck them out entirely. And get rid of his two Howardist hold-outs, Cornall and Jordana, while he’s at it.