The Northern Territory Country Liberal Party (CLP) government announced its response to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s September 2025 NT Voluntary Assisted Dying Inquiry Final Report on March 18.
The inquiry recommended the Northern Territory (NT) adopt a progressive voluntary assisted dying (VAD) model, in line with the experience nationwide, most recently in the ACT’s 2024 VAD legislation.
Although accepting “in principle” the bulk of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee Inquiry report’s 86 recommendations, NT Attorney General Marie-Claire Boothby announced the CLP had added two restrictions. These go against national trends and even against their own inquiry’s recommendations.
The first is a prognostic time frame stating terminally-ill patients must have a “condition which is advanced, progressive and expected to cause death within 12 months”.
Six and 12 month prognostic time frames for VAD have been widely discredited by doctors, researchers and advocates as unreliable safeguards. They are considered an inaccurate and unworkable requirement, with experts describing it as “uncertain and imprecise”, particularly with non-cancer diagnoses.
The second restriction is the inclusion of a “gag clause” that bans trained medical professionals from raising VAD as a legal end of life choice unless requested first by the patient.
The Medical Journal of Australia found the gag clause in Victoria’s law, removed after last year’s VAD statutory review because of its ineffectiveness, to be “ethically problematic”. It considered it to be an “unprecedented, unwarranted infringement on communication between health practitioners and their patients”.
Marshall Perron, former CLP Chief Minister and architect of the Northern Territory’s world-first 1995 Rights of the Terminally Ill Act, had previously written to the NT Attorney General asking her not to impose prognostic time frames in the bill. “They do not protect the so-called ‘vulnerable’,” he wrote.
“Other provisions in the legislation already do that. Their sole practical effect is to exclude eligible and suffering individuals from accessing VAD,” he continued. “In short, using a timeframe as a gate keeping mechanism is neither fair nor clinically sound.”
CLP rewrites history
Perron also slammed the NT Attorney General Marie-Clare Boothby’s comments in the NT Independent on March 23 about the Territory’s original assisted dying legislation.
Boothby claimed that “the CLP led the nation by introducing the rights of the terminally ill 30 years ago. Three decades on, we are once again progressing careful and considered reform in this space.”
Perron said that claim is “inaccurate”, “absurd” and an “embarrassment for the party”, adding that the CLP’s handling of the bill was “inept”.
“The Attorney-General’s claim that the bill was an initiative of the CLP is a display of ignorance from a senior minister and must be an embarrassment for the government,” Perron said.
It was originally a private members bill. “Neither the CLP nor the ALP had anything to do with the drafting or introduction of the bill. Neither party played a role in the public campaign in support of, or opposition to, the bill,” Perron said.
Convenor of the grassroots NT VAD working group Suzanne James agreed, telling Green Left that the CLP had to be cornered into acting on VAD this time around by a sustained community and media campaign.
“Our working group was formed right after the 2024 NT election with support from Dying With Dignity Victoria,” James said. “Chaired by Justine Davis, Independent MP for Johnston, it includes long-term NT campaigners Judy Dent (NT VES), Sue Shearer (CEO of Council of the Ageing NT) and VAD Young Ambassador Anna Philip.”
It led to Davis moving in May last year that the CLP support the recommendations of the former Labor government’s 2024 VAD inquiry report and progress the VAD law.
“The CLP responded by further delaying the bill and setting up another inquiry which, ultimately, also recommended that Territorians have their world-first voluntary assisted dying rights restored.”
James said advocates are pleased the media has covered the overwhelming community support for VAD and terminally-ill Territorians, who want the government to stop stalling and “just get on with it”.
Go Gentle Australia has started a major campaign for the restoration of VAD rights in the NT and the Council of the Ageing NT will hold a community event on April 20 with Peter Warren from the World Federation of Right to Die Societies.
The draft law remains on track to be introduced to Northern Territory Parliament mid-2026.