Recently, South Australia’s Health Minister Blair Boyer, and Deputy Premier and Attorney General Kyam Maher, joined voices to urge the Federal Labor Government to allow telehealth appointments for voluntary assisted dying (VAD).
Currently, the Federal Criminal Code does not allow euthanasia to be discussed via telehealth – recognising that online appointments reduce the ability for doctors to identify potential coercion impacting the patient’s decision-making process.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese himself has raised concerns that replacing compulsory face-to-face consultations with telehealth could make it more difficult to identify coercion or elder abuse.
Yet now, South Australia has become the first State to formally urge the Commonwealth to amend the federal law and allow telehealth access, arguing that rural South Australians are disadvantaged because of the face-to-face requirement.
When VAD was debated in South Australia in 2021, ACL opposed its legalisation on the basis of the sanctity of human life and the inability of legislative safeguards to eliminate the risk of coercion, pressure and abuse affecting vulnerable people.
The language of “choice” and “bodily autonomy” was used to justify a profound change in the role of the State: from preventing suicide to creating a lawful pathway by which medical practitioners may intentionally assist in bringing about suicide.
Between 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025, 634 South Australians died through the scheme.
ACL also warned during the original debate that once euthanasia was legalised, pressure would inevitably arise to broaden access and remove safeguards regarded as barriers.
International experience provides reason to take that concern seriously. In Canada, VAD accounted for 5.1 per cent of all deaths in 2024 – approximately one in every 20 deaths – with 16,499 people dying through VAD that year.
ACL has written to the South Australian Health Minister urging the Government not to advocate for the removal of the existing telehealth restriction, which functions as an important safeguard against abuse and coercion.
Such protections must take precedence over the inconvenience of travelling for an appointment: the consequences of failing to identify coercion are grave and irreversible.
Despite South Australia having a more conservative VAD scheme than some other states, recent media commentary and now this push from the South Australian Government signal a concerning shift: the increasing normalisation of VAD, accompanied by growing pressure to expand access and dismantle safeguards considered necessary when the legislation was first passed.
As the due date for a statutory review of South Australia’s VAD legislation approaches, ACL is closely monitoring calls to expand the scheme and will continue to advocate for the retention and strengthening of safeguards that protect vulnerable South Australians from coercion, pressure and abuse.
