Dying with Dignity Victoria has been campaigning for voluntary assisted dying since 1974, fifty years now, and it took 43 of those years to get a law passed, and another two to bring it into effect. Even now, it’s still being built, one law reform, one clinic, one difficult family conversation at a time. Across many episodes of Don’t Be Caught Dead, I’ve followed that build from the ground up: the decades of campaigning that got the law passed in the first place, the research now tracking whether it actually works as intended, the doctors administering it in the city and the bush, a daughter who walked her mother through the whole process, a doula trying to build somewhere better for people to go, a photographer who spent two and a half years documenting it, and a nurse who sits at its rare intersection with organ donation. This is that story, told the way it actually happened: through the people who built it, use it, and live alongside it.

The Fifty-Year Fight

Jane Morris is president of Dying with Dignity Victoria, an organisation that started in 1974 as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society of Victoria, founded by a couple with no medical training who simply saw a need nobody else was meeting. Jane walked me through the decades that followed: the Medical Treatment Act of 1988, giving people the right to refuse treatment; Dr Helga Kuhse’s speech to the Australian Medical Association, which reached the Northern Territory’s chief minister by chance and helped inspire the world’s first assisted dying law there in 1995, before it was overturned by the federal parliament less than two years later. Victoria’s own law finally passed in 2017, by four votes in the upper house, and became operative on 19 June 2019.

Much of that history runs through one man. Dr Rodney Syme, a Melbourne urologist, joined the Dying with Dignity board around the time of the Medical Treatment Act and became, in Jane’s words, the person who led the way for the whole movement. He helped a Supreme Court case establish that withdrawing tube feeding was considered medical treatment and could be legally refused by the patient or withdrawn if not considered to be in the patient’s best interest. he spent decades quietly, then publicly, helping dying people access lethal medication before any law protected him for doing so, often ringing the coroner and or the police himself afterwards. Jane’s own path to the organisation ran directly through him: she attended his lectures while studying bioethics, then simply asked him how she could help. Syme died in 2021, and his final book, arguing the law still doesn’t go far enough for people with dementia, was published after his death.

Jane doesn’t sugarcoat what was still left to fix when we spoke last year. Victoria’s law carried what’s known as the “gag clause”: doctors weren’t permitted to raise VAD with a patient themselves, only to respond if the patient asked first. She called it discriminatory, since patients who don’t know to ask, because of language, education, or simple trust in their doctor, are effectively locked out. Not every aged care facility allowed VAD to happen on site either; Dying with Dignity Victoria had written to 660 facilities asking, and got very few replies back. Some of this may have shifted since our conversation, law reform in this space moves quickly, so it’s worth checking the current state of play in your state. But she also held onto the good stories: a man in Warrnambool who grew sunflowers, gave his hospital staff a handful of his own seeds as thanks, and whose daughter still can’t see a sunflower without thinking of his death as “absolutely beautiful.”

The Legal Scholar

Professor Ben White has spent his career studying how end-of-life law actually plays out in hospital rooms, not just on paper. He told me that compliance with VAD law is very high, but that advance care directives are a different story: family pressure at the bedside can override a person’s documented wishes even when the law says it shouldn’t. One health practitioner in his research put it simply, after training on the law, they realised “it’s not the person with the loudest voice in the room who makes the decision.” Ben’s research has also tracked a strange, unintended barrier: a Commonwealth law aimed at stopping people inciting suicide over the phone has been confirmed by the Federal Court to capture VAD too, meaning many steps in the process legally can’t happen by phone or video call, forcing gravely unwell patients to travel for face-to-face assessments even when they live in the middle of a city.

The GPs on the Frontline

Dr Nick Carr, a Melbourne GP, and Dr Kane Treble, based in Mildura, are two of the doctors actually doing this work, one in the city, one in the bush. Nick became involved after the death of his patient Beverley Broadbent, who wasn’t terminally ill and so wouldn’t have qualified for VAD, but who knew her faculties were failing and was determined not to end up like her best friend, who had suffered a long decline in aged care. Her decision to end her own life on her own terms, and to speak publicly about it beforehand, helped build momentum toward the law. Kane described the practical toll of the telehealth restriction Ben White outlined: a patient two hours away, a phone call where he can only say “we need to catch up face to face” without explaining why, then hours of travel each way for someone who is already exhausted and unwell. Both doctors want the gag clause gone. As one of them put it, there’s no other area of medicine where doctors are legally barred from telling patients about an option that might help them. What they see, again and again, is relief: patients who collect their medication, put it on a shelf, and get on with living, because, as one patient told them, “now I’ve got the dying sorted out.”

The Daughter

Barb Gering’s mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, tried chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy and a clinical trial, and was hospitalised repeatedly by brutal reactions to each one. When she finally said no to further treatment, her oncologist gave her a prognosis of two to six months. Barb and her mother completed the VAD paperwork early, while her mother could still hold the conversations required, well before things became urgent. Barb described the process in detail: three separate assessments, a discussion about self-administering the medication or receiving it intravenously in hospital, and a permit that finally came through in January. Her mother chose a date, then changed nothing about it, and the family gathered the day before for a final lunch of seafood paella and Aperol spritz. Near the end, her mother asked her, “when do you think you’ll be ready to let me go?” Barb’s answer: “this isn’t about me... I’m not going to ask you to stay an extra day if that’s not what you want.” She described the choice itself as being like a parachute: however you got into that position, you still get to decide when you pull the cord.

The Doula

Baci Hillyer is a certified end-of-life doula and volunteer with Dying with Dignity Victoria, who is now working with a fellow volunteer to establish what would be Victoria’s first dedicated VAD hospice. She draws a clear line between palliative care and VAD: palliative patients are often still hoping, still uncertain how much time is left, while people who have chosen VAD tend to arrive at a rare kind of certainty and peace. Not everyone who receives the medication ends up using it, she says, but simply having the choice changes how people face what’s coming. Her frustration is with the gaps in between: many people don’t want to die in hospital, but there’s currently nowhere purpose-built for them to go instead, which is exactly the gap she and her collaborators are trying to close.

The Photographer

Julian Kingma spent two and a half years photographing people who had chosen VAD for his book The Power of Choice, working with Andrew Denton’s organisation Go Gentle Australia. He described sitting with each person for hours before he ever picked up a camera, and being present, on at least one occasion, for the moment someone died after taking the medication. Among his portraits is Liberty Pack, a woman with motor neurone disease who hadn’t been outside in six years, cared for by her husband. Another is Nigel, who Julian photographed with his wife Cath on the day of his death; Julian burst into tears on arrival, and Nigel got up to console him. What Julian hopes people take from the book is simple: that VAD is not a rash decision or a hidden one, but something done with enormous care, by people who are, in his words, given the power to choose how their death comes, rather than just when.

Where VAD Meets Organ Donation

Jessica Amsden has spent almost fourteen years with DonateLife, and her current role sits at a genuinely new intersection: supporting people who want to donate their organs after they die by VAD. Unlike the conventional donation pathway, which almost always plays out in an ICU with a family making decisions on someone else’s behalf, Jess is often welcomed into a person’s own home while they’re still very much alive to make the decision themselves. “It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it now,” she told me, describing what it’s like to be invited in.

What she hears back from patients, consistently, is that donation gives them something rare in their final weeks: a sense of purpose, and the feeling that they aren’t dying in vain. She remembers one man whose wife said it visibly lifted him in his last weeks, giving him something to focus on beyond his own decline. Jess was also careful to spell out the ethical guardrails that keep the two decisions, VAD and donation, entirely separate: the process is fully confidential, and any potential recipient is typically not told a donor exists until the day before, guided entirely by the donor’s own timeline rather than anyone else’s.

Still Under Construction

One piece of this puzzle has moved since these conversations were recorded. When Ben White and I spoke, the Northern Territory still had no VAD law of its own, though a bill looked likely. That bill, the Rights of the Terminally Ill Bill 2026, was introduced to NT parliament on 23 July 2026, and the Chief Minister has confirmed it has the numbers to pass. If it does, every Australian state and territory will finally have voluntary assisted dying laws, closing a loop that started with the NT’s own world-first law in 1995, before it was overturned by the federal parliament two years later. Fittingly, though, the new bill is expected to include its own version of the gag clause Jane Morris has spent years fighting to remove from Victoria’s law, a reminder that even the newest laws in this space keep inheriting the same unfinished arguments.

What comes through when you line these accounts up isn’t agreement on the details, Jane wants the gag clause gone, Baci wants somewhere other than a hospital bed, Julian wants people to stop imagining it as reckless. It’s agreement on what it gives the person at the centre of it: relief, certainty, and a rare kind of control returned to someone who has had almost none. As Barb Gering put it, VAD isn’t for everybody. But for the people it’s for, it can be the most dignified, gentle thing anyone gets to choose.