You would be hard-pressed to find a more interesting piece of legislation than Bob Brown’s Restoring Territory Rights (Voluntary Euthanasia Legislation) Bill 2010 along with a similar bill covering the ACT. Interesting, because the bill is actually a state and territory rights bill — an attempt to reverse the process by which the NT’s voluntary euthanasia laws were quashed by federal parliament some years ago.

Given it’s a territory rights issue, you’d think the Liberals and Nationals would support it. But of course they won’t, because they oppose voluntary euthanasia.

On the face of it, this is curious. We know that voluntary euthanasia — like legal abortion — has around a 65% to 70% support in Australia, and has had for at least a decade. Yet the Howard government’s early act of overturning the Territory’s VE laws in 1997 essentially quashed any notion that Coalition MPs might be allowed to vote on their conscience.

Why should this be? On the face of it, euthanasia simply does not fit on the left-right spectrum. Nothing someone believes about how the economy should be organised will tell you what they think about life and death. Religion may, but that appears on both sides of the divide too.

But one way in which something like euthanasia is drawn into current left-right notions is when it is redefined not as a philosophical and ethical issue, but as a cultural one, and entered into the culture wars.

The right has become increasingly hardened against voluntary euthanasia over the last two decades, as it has become increasingly addicted to the notion that a state-enforced social conservatism can put some limits on the nihilistic processes of the market, and the disarray that creates.

By enforcing ‘traditional’ values — even when they’ve ceased to be values held by a majority — you can then go hell for leather in uprooting every other aspect of people’s lives. That allegedly creates a stable society. I think it creates an asocial nightmare, red-bull-vodka-CCTV and tasers world, but there you go.

In such a culture — where any notion of the human, inviolable or genuinely conserved is traded on the open market — abstract notions of traditional value must be instituted. One of them is the idea of ‘life’. Whether applied to abortion, euthanasia, disability or a hundred other issues, ‘life’ becomes this abstract quality detached from the process of living by actual beings.

The US is the home of this, and the Tea Party is its ideal political expression — along with the junk laws whereby an embryo acquires full human rights, standard discontinuation of care becomes murder and so on. A fanatical commitment to ‘life’ becomes a way of affirming it, where every other social process — work, consumption, media — treats people as objects rather than subjects.

Genuine liberals and libertarians should welcome voluntary euthanasia as the extension of free choice. Neoconservatives who see limits on personal freedom as an essential step in guarding that other freedom — the freedom of capital in the market — by contrast regard issues like euthanasia as exactly the place where the line must be drawn. If freedom becomes something that reshapes social life, then its current expression as a series of consumer choices is made visible as a pseudo-freedom.

Faced with the undoubted majority support for something like VE, neoconservatives resort to bald-faced elitism. Thus Paul ‘Polonius’ Kelly in The Australian urges Gillard not to become the PM who authorises ‘legal killing’, even though Gillard is, quite properly, treating the issue as a conscience vote.

Kelly fudges the issue magnificently; it’s a real performance. Listing the jurisdictions which allow VE he includes the Netherlands and Belgium, but skips Switzerland — which actually, unlike other places, allows it to non-citizens. Why? Because the low countries have the image of hippy-crackpot zones, whereas Switzerland is conservative sobriety itself. It doesn’t fit the politics, so consciously or otherwise, Kelly excludes it.

How does he deal with majority support for VE? More dissembling, arguing that the 1996 NT debate showed most people believe VE to be discontinuation of treatment. Nonsense. The VE question has been asked 19 different ways from Sunday, and every time it comes with the same result — a two-thirds-or-so approval.

Death machines, plastic bags and suicide pills have become part of the culture. The X hundred pages of WorkChoices legislation — that apparently was a free choice. Euthanasia? Not so much. In The Age Peter Costello, in a magnificent piece of nudge-nudge, intimated that Brown’s VE bill was part of sustainability and death taxes programme — some sort of conveyer belt of the sick into green coffers and sandwiches (‘tell them soylent Green is made from battlers!’).

These positions are irritating to anyone — but all the more so for your correspondent, for I too oppose voluntary euthanasia, and think there’s a good argument to be made against it from the left…

*Part two of Guy Rundle’s euthanasia essay in Monday’s Crikey.