How Vic's VAD laws failed Diana Beaton
Proposed amendments to Victoria's VAD law include allowing a compassionate exemption to the state's strict residency requirement. This simple change would have made all the difference to Diana Beaton.
Diana did what many Australians do in retirement - she sold up and moved in order to maximise her modest income.
She put her Sydney apartment on the market and moved to a retirement village in St Kilda, Melbourne at the end of 2023.
Aged 80, Diana was in good health and looked forward to her new life, immersed in the cultural activities she enjoyed such as arthouse cinema, literature, music and theatre.
She brought with her a good sound system and her most treasured records, with her musical tastes ranging from classical to American bluegrass.
A mad foodie, she had ordered a Danish dining table and was looking forward to holding dinner parties, with plenty of her beloved pinot grigio. In her lifetime, she had travelled widely, helped set up the Elsie Women’s Refuge in Sydney and was dedicated to public service.
“Diana was intelligent, well read and bubbly. She loved people. She was very social and sophisticated,” longtime friend Kaye Greenleaf said.
Diana was active and looked young for her age. She’d had regular medical checks and tests, and at the time of her move to Melbourne, believed herself to be in good health.
However at the end of April 2024, six months after the move, Diana was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. A pain in her leg turned out to be the cancer that had metastasised into her bones.
“She had no idea she was sick. She was exhausted but had put that down to the move,” Kaye said.
Diana enquired about voluntary assisted dying (VAD), only to discover she would not meet Victoria’s rigid one-year residency requirement.
Unlike other states, Victoria does not allow any exemptions to the law, even for people who have recently moved states such as Diana.
By August that year, Diana was in great pain and too weak for treatment. She had frequent visitors but on the night she died she was alone, in hospital -only a few months short of satisfying the residency requirement.
Diana’s longtime friend Anne Summers, with whom she grew up in Adelaide, was moved to write a story in the Saturday Paper: The Lonely Death of Diana Beaton, enraged that her friend had been denied a peaceful and compassionate death.
“No candles, no music, no reassuring hands holding and helping her, no murmurs of love and farewell. No aura of consolation to ease her passage,’’ Summers wrote.
Summers described Victoria’s VAD laws as “pitiless”, “where a person is denied an easy death simply because they fell a few months short of an arbitrary residency requirement”.
Proposed amendments to Victoria’s VAD law include an exemption from the residency requirement on compassionate grounds, or if a person currently lives or receives medical treatment in Victoria.
Under the proposed changes, there is no doubt Diana would have had a strong case for an exemption.
“It’s just so unfair. It was completely unnecessary. Nobody was even allowed to look at her situation. If an exemption had been available, she would have been granted it,” says Kaye.
The strict residency requirement in Victoria’s 2017 VAD legislation was intended to stop people travelling from other jurisdictions to access VAD.
However it has become increasingly redundant as every state and the ACT now has VAD laws.
As Kaye points out: “She didn’t go to Victoria to access VAD. She could have had it in NSW.”
“She wanted to have a choice. And she had no idea Victoria had this clause - she expected to be able to die with her loved ones around her,’’ she said.
“She would have wanted to die at her retirement home, where she had settled in well, and her friends and extended family would have flown in to be there.
“Victoria should be brought into line with the other states."
The proposed amendments are being debated in Victorian parliament.
Read our guide to the Victorian VAD amendments
Families and experts call for Vic VAD reform