Slippery slopes down under: the progressive loosening of requirements for voluntary assisted dying in Australia and New Zealand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between November 2017 and June 2024 eight jurisdictions in Australia and New Zealand passed laws to legalise some form of euthanasia and/or assisted suicide. Like the United States, Australia has a federal constitution and 'voluntary assisted dying' (VAD) in Australia has been legalised at the state level. However, unlike the United States, Australia and New Zealand both permit practitioner administration of the lethal drug (euthanasia) as well as self-administration (assisted suicide). Another difference is that physician-assisted suicide, at first, spread very slowly in the United States, and new laws were based closely on the requirements of the original legislation in Oregon. In contrast, in Australia and New Zealand, the spread of VAD has been rapid from the outset, and there is a discernible pattern of successive weakening of safeguards in more recent legislation. The Australian model has increasingly come to resemble that of Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".