MY experience with death has been both personal and professional.

I stood alongside my father while he took his last breath and his heartbeat slowly faded away. He left this world at the age of 54 — far too young — as a result of losing a long-running battle with illness.

I stood alongside my wife as her only sister died in an adjacent hospital room, as a result of an aggressive and incurable cancer, which took her life away at the age of 42. She was sick for only three months.

And for more than a decade before I was elected to Parliament I had the solemn privilege of working as a lawyer, representing hundreds of men and women who were at the end stages of their life.

They all unsuccessfully fought their own battle with mesothelioma, an evil bastard of a cancer, striking down those unlucky enough to have inhaled deadly asbestos dust through absolutely no fault of their own.

Mesothelioma usually kills its victim within about nine months. My job meant being by the side of my client at most stages of that journey, sometimes bringing the courtroom to their hospital bed because they were too sick to get out of it.

Inevitably it was a race against the clock to get justice in the form of a settlement of their case, which could happen anytime from just after their diagnosis to within hours before the end of their life.

These experiences have shaped my views in relation to euthanasia, made topical at the moment having regard to the recent passage of the Victorian Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill 2017.

I would have opposed the legislation.

I understand and respect the views of those who advocate for the passage of legislation making euthanasia lawful. It’s just that I fundamentally disagree with them.

And as legislators, let’s be very clear-eyed in what we would be doing if we were to vote for such a law. As Paul Keating has said — “(it) means permitting physicians to intentionally kill patients or assisting patients in killing themselves”.

First, I am entirely unpersuaded that we have invested sufficiently in palliative care, in order to ensure that all patients facing death because of a terminal disease are given state-of-the-art palliative care options to ease the inevitable burden of the physical and emotional pain that comes with end stages of life.

Second, how do we reconcile the fundamental ethical obligation of our physicians not to be “involved in interventions that have as their primary intention the ending of a person’s life”, yet under this legislation, they are integral to the process of knowingly ending a person’s life prematurely?

There is a world of difference between a doctor not taking active steps to preserve the life of someone at the end stages of their disease and unequivocally ending another person’s life, which is what this legislation contemplates.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about the prospect of lawful euthanasia is that we don’t know where it will end up.

As Paul Kelly from The Australian writes: “We are expected to believe the law can authorise killing and assisted suicide in the name of compassion, yet at the same time protect the vulnerable, the depressed, the poor and those anxious to ‘do the right thing by their family’ from unnecessarily nominating themselves for the final poison.”

I have a terrible feeling that once we start up this ride, we won’t be able to get off it.

And even if there is only one person who wants to die prematurely pursuant to this legislation, but then changes their mind at the very last minute but feels that they can’t do anything about it, the circumstances are too horrible to contemplate.

- MONDAY: Robin Chapple and why he’s for euthanasia