Labor Party commits to legalising suicide telehealth calls
At its national conference in Adelaide this week, the Labor Party committed itself to a single, stark outcome: making it lawful for a doctor to help end a patient’s life after nothing more than a phone call or a video link.
The Labor National Conference
Moved by Victorian MP Ryan Batchelor, the amendment commits federal Labor to stripping out the Commonwealth Criminal Code provision that currently makes it an offence to discuss suicide over a “carriage service”, a phone, a video link, or an email. The move was to allow doctors to use telehealth services to direct people to euthanasia. Batchelor called the existing law “inequitable” and said it was “distressing”, because he believes that regional communities do not have adequate access to centres that euthanise people. What he did not say is that the law was upheld by the Federal Court as recently as 2023, where the court did not find a meaningful difference between “voluntary assisted dying” and suicide. Parliament decided over two decades ago that counselling someone toward their own death was too serious a matter not to be criminalised.
One Labor MP saw this plainly. NSW’s Sally Quinnell was the only delegate at the entire three-day conference to speak against the motion. These, she said, are literally life and death conversations, and she was right to insist they cannot be handled the way a repeat prescription can. Her objection was voted down. Attorney-General Michelle Rowland then moved a second motion, passed without opposition, rewriting Labor’s own constitution to guarantee a conscience vote on the question.
Concerns for Euthanasia
Supporters describe the in-person requirement as red tape. It is not. The Australian Christian Lobby has raised this for years, pointing to overseas jurisdictions where telehealth assessments for assisted dying have reportedly been carried out with a casualness that should alarm anyone who believes that every human life is valuable. Canada is the clearest warning. It legalised euthanasia in 2016 for people with a terminal illness. Within a few years, eligibility had been expanded to people who were not terminally ill, and the government had drawn up plans, despite public backlash, to extend it further still to people whose only qualifying condition was a mental illness.
Documented cases have emerged of Canadians citing poverty, inadequate disability support, or unstable housing among their reasons for seeking death. No jurisdiction that has walked through this door has ever simply stopped where it started, and there is no reason to think telehealth access will be the last item on this agenda rather than the next one.
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The Fix Nobody Is Funding
Every argument for euthanasia-by-telehealth rests on the same premise: that people in regional and remote Australia struggle to get to a doctor, and something must be done. That premise is true. But the something being proposed is not better palliative care, or more specialists outside capital cities, or investment that would let a dying person choose comfort and company over suicide. It is a workaround that makes it easier to end a life in the very places where it is hardest to properly support one. If the problem is genuinely access, the answer is access to better health care, not making suicide the default option.
A Culture of Death
Making Euthanasia more accessible only contributes to a growing culture of death in the Western world. Australia, like many other Western countries, has legalised both abortion and euthanasia, killing babies before they are even born, and helping the ill and elderly commit suicide. This is how a culture of death advances, not through a single dramatic law, but through amendments like this one: modest, procedural, framed as access and equity, and each one moving the line a little further. Nobody at this week's conference voted to say a life stops mattering. They just voted to make it a little easier to end one.
Once a country accepts that some lives may be ended because they have become inconvenient or hard to bear, it stops asking whether a life is worth ending, and starts asking only how, and how easily. Telehealth is this week's answer to how. It will not be the last.
References
1. AAP. “Labor backs telehealth for voluntary assisted dying.” Australian Community Media network, 24 July 2026.
2. Australian Christian Lobby. “Protect Our Vulnerable: Say NO to Euthanasia by ‘Telehealth’.” acl.org.au.