15 April 2020

Our origin story

Have you ever wondered where it all started with Go Gentle Australia?

In our COVID-imposed physical isolation, we’ve delved into the vault to revisit our origins – and been inspired.

We believe you might be too.

Over 18 months in 2014/15, Andrew Denton – one of Australia’s truly creative media identities – asked himself an important question: why are good people dying bad deaths in Australia, and why are there no laws to help them?

The result: a remarkable 17-part podcast called Better Off Dead in which Denton travels the world to investigate the stories, moral arguments and individuals on both sides of the debate about euthanasia.

The podcast and its success led to the launch of Go Gentle Australia, and a renewed push for Voluntary Assisted Dying laws in this country.

If you haven't heard it yet, it is compelling listening. Find it here.

Why are good people dying bad deaths?

"I wanted to inform the debate and I wanted to inflame the debate," Andrew Denton says of the Better Off Dead podcast.

"I want politicians and doctors to stop sitting on their hands while Australians needlessly suffer."

His starting point for the podcast was a conference of euthanasia opponents.

"I used that as the road map for this journey," Denton told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2016.

"It was incredibly useful, because otherwise I wouldn't have understood so fully what their arguments against it were."

His suspicion then – and his enduring conviction today – is that at the heart of the arguments against Voluntary Assisted Dying is a deeply conservative, religious morality whose logic don't stand up to scrutiny.

Better Off Dead is a forensic examination of the failure of our existing legal frameworks regarding end of life.

It remains a revealing expose of the needless suffering happening every day in the absence of more compassionate end-of-life choices.

Listen to Episode One

If you valued this content, why not head to our Resources page for more? We have a wide range of ebooks, films and documentaries available online for free!

Our origin story

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