The Chaser Report - Laugh Till You Die | Andrew Denton | CHANGEMAKERS

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

Andrew Denton helped put The Chaser on TV back in the day. To make up for that he has tried to make the world a better place. Today you can hear him speak on The ChangeMakers Podcast, hosted by Amanda Tattersall, about how he led the Australian campaign to change the law on Voluntary Assisted Dying.Find out more about:ChangeMakers: https://changemakerspodcast.org/andrew-denton-changemaker-chat-laugh-till-you-die/Go Gentle: https://www.gogentleaustralia.org.au/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser report. Hello, welcome to The Chaser with Dom and Charles. Dom here on today's feed something a little bit different. You might know, if you know the history of the Chaser, how important Andrew Denton was to us getting started in the world of television. He produced our first two series, The Election Chaser and CNNN, and was an incredible mentor to us and supporter of us. in our early days. Today, we have an interview with Andrew Denton, not from us, but from Amanda Tadisle, the host of the fabulous Changemakers podcast, which is part of our iconoclast

podcast's family. It's a great podcast for anyone interested in social change, how to achieve it. And unlike Charles and me, who just talk about stuff, how to actually get in there and make things happen. That's exactly what Andrew Denton decided to do with the cause of voluntary assisted dying, aka euthanasia. He campaigned successfully for the laws to be changed right around the country and formed an organisation called Go Gentle to make the case for doing this. So the journey from being one of Australia's funniest people to really changing policy undertaken by Andrew Denton is our subject today.

We interviewed him about this on the feed several years ago. You can probably find that in the history. But we thought you'd enjoy this conversation between Andrew Denton and Amanda Tadisle. Make sure you subscribe to the ChangeMakers podcast wherever you get your podcast or you can check out Changemakerspodcast.org, and for Andrew's organisation, it's go-gentlea-Australia.org. com. Enjoy, and we'll catch you next time. There's nothing funny about death, which is why it's kind of funny, that one of Australia's most beloved comedians and public figures decided to take on the issue

of death in the third act of his extraordinary career. Today's ChangeMaker chat is with Andrew Denton. Andrew Denton is one of the most well-known Australian comedians. He has a long list of outrageously successful television shows and radio programs. And, full disclosure, he did mentor a lovely comedy team called The Chaser, and I do happen to be married to one of them. Andrew then shifted into a kind of Australian Michael Parkinson, hosting long-form television interviews with some of the world's biggest characters.

But for the best part of the last decade, Andrew Denton has been tirelessly focused on death, prosecuting a campaign for the right to voluntary assisted dying across Australia. This is something he has not done alone, and it's involved in building a powerful organisation called Go Gentle. He has benefited greatly from the support of people like Northern Territory Chief Minister Marshal Perron, who was the first person in the world to legalise assisted dying, and the mentorship of the late Dr Rodney Syme. Today we talk about all of it, about how early Denton, the funny guy,

and late Denton, The Serious Guy, have helped produce one of the most successful Australian campaigns for policy change we've seen in recent decades. So, let's go. I'm Amanda Tattiser, welcome to ChangeMaker Chats, conversations with people changing the world. ChangeMakers also produces episodes that feature stories about social change campaigns.

ChangeMakers' UK episodes are supported by the Civic Power Fund and work with the UCL Policy Lab. They bring together extraordinary ideas and everyday experience to understand how we can change the world. Check them out at UCL.ac.ac.uk upac.ukuk power.org.org.com. We are broadcast on ACAST and a part of the Oconnaclass network. You can find us there, as well as on all the usual podcast apps. You can also find out more about changemakers on our website where you can sign up to our email list. It's Changemakerspodcast.org. Andrew Denton, it is such a pleasure to have you on Changemakers. Amanda Tatisle,

it is a pleasure to be here making change. I'm not sure if we're actually going to be making change, but we're definitely going to be talking about some extraordinary change. Okay, all right, let's do it. Well, my understanding is it's actually your change. My friend that we're going to be talking about. That's right. I am transitioning as I speak. Yeah, I know. I know. But before we get into the story of all of the interesting things you've done around voluntary, voluntary euthanasia and all that sort of stuff, I actually want to just start at the start, which is, I always ask my guest, Andrew, what kind of changemaker are you? What kind of change maker are you, Andrew Denton? Well, I don't know what the categories are.

What are the choices? Is there an option? This is not a multiple choice question. This is an open So if I just said a lemony pink changemaker, would that be a sufficient answer? Look, if it means something to you, that's interesting. I don't know if it's going to mean someone, anyone who's listening. So maybe if you could try more. So what kind of change maker? Well, first of all, I suspect my most change makers, an amateur. And secondly, determined.

Yeah. A determined change maker. A determined change. And I've found that anger is an excellent fuel and a terrible compass. for any kind of change making. An excellent fuel and a terrible compass. I think that that is interesting, right? There's a place for emotion in change making,

but it doesn't necessarily take it to the right place. No. Yes. Okay, so we're going to hear a lot about the work that you've done across Australia in kind of really in doing some pretty transformative stuff around voluntary euthanasia. But before we get to that, some of our, look, I'll be straight. I reckon most people in Australia are going to go, Andrew Tenton, I've heard of him, but there's plenty who might not.

I know. I've done a very good disappearing job, and also I'm old. Sure. Let's be honest. Let's be up front. Lucky it's a podcast, right? They can't see. But what, you know, plenty of overseas or listeners who won't be able to place you.

Tell us about your story in a sense. Like, tell us about your public role, your comments. before we get into how you have sort of segueed into change me. Yeah, into Dr. Death, that fun category of change making. Well, for the overseas listeners, just to help, think of Idris Elba, and then think of everything he isn't and doesn't represent, and then you're getting towards me. Right.

So to cut a long story short, a few years ago I went to Central Asia, I went to Uzbekistan, and I wanted to go to Turkmenistan, and they wouldn't let me in. It's the only time I've ever been refused entry to a country, and it took me some months to get to the bottom of why, and the bottom of why was because in my early career, I was a satirist, and they obviously didn't want anybody that was going to potentially say an amusing thing about that country. Yes, that's right. Also, perhaps wearing the man can he was a bad idea.

So I started my media career as doing improvisational comedy. writing satire, writing sketches. I went through that to a lot of television production, including an extremely well-known comedy group in this country called The Chaser, to whom you are sexually attracted in at least one instance. I need to one of them. Well, sure. You say whatever you need to say, madam. I say whatever I mean. Yeah, that's right. Whereas I was sexually attracted to most of them. They are beautiful white men. They are beautiful, white men, as indeed am I.

But then I moved into more serious television. The very first television series I made called Blah, Blah, Blah, I actually came up with a description of it, which was serious television done stupidly. Then I moved into just more straight television, including very long-form interviews, with a long-running show, which was very well-received in Australia. And we interviewed everyone from, I will say we,

because I worked with a team, from US presidents to murderers to cab drivers. and it was a very unusual show and it seemed to work very well. Anyway, I kept working in television until I thought, I'm just so over this. So I moved out of television and I had this space where I thought,

what am I going to do next? What do I want to do? And I kept all these files of things that were really interesting to me and one of them was euthanasia. Yeah. And just by coincidence, there was an article published

in a local magazine by an Australian writer but whose father was Dutch. Now, Holland is a country her euthanasia is legal and her father she got a phone call one day saying your father's going to be dead next Saturday he had cancer please come for his final week and she went and she described this week of grace and farewells and all his friends came and did him on her and he farewelled the family in his last night under the stars listening to Mozart and it sounded so civilized and I contrasted that with the death of my own father which had been about a decade earlier

who had congestive heart failure and it was three days of pain and, you know, being given all the drugs and they weren't working. And I just thought, why don't we have this in Australia? And a friend of mine had asked me to host an event in Melbourne. They were just starting up, which was where a public figure gave a talk on a controversial subject. And he asked me to host it. And I said, no, I won't host it, but I'll do next years for you. I'll give the talk and I'll do it on this.

And it's one of those things, the expression I use is you put, yourself in play. You just take a leap. You have no idea necessarily what that's going to mean. And I thought, okay, I don't want to give this speech and be, quote, unquote, a celebrity turning up with an opinion. So I'm going to have to go and do research. And so I took myself always on my own time, my own time to Europe and to America where these laws existed. And my friend said to me, well, you should record the interviews and do a podcast, which I hadn't thought about. And I didn't know it at the time, but that's basically led to the next 10 years of my life and the activism or change-making we're about to talk about.

I just think that it's hilarious, Andrew. I was going to ask you all these questions that, you know, and to draw you through the story that you just presented. It's like you've done this before. I'm feeling enough rope about this already, right? Anyway. Which for those overseas was the name of the show. Was the name of the show, that is true.

Before we jump, though, into the story, and I want to spend a lot of time on the story because actually I think there's so much to learn, partly because as you describe yourself as an amateur, I actually think that that's the most interesting thing. Like, how do you approach and deal with a change in a question, which you know is a problem, but you don't have any experience in making change? I think that's a really important story for other people to be able to listen to. But I'm just wondering, I mean, clearly we're interested in politics at some level. You did political satire.

And as you say, I do know people in that space. And they come to that space with, like they don't, they choose political satire because they have a thought about wanting to make change, even through that as an art form. Yes. Was there something already in you about that question of wanting to make change, about seeing the world as unfair, as seeing things as unjust or authority figures that needed to be pulled down? What was in, what was there something in that for you?

Yeah. So my family background, particularly my father, he was a political thinker, I guess you'd say. And, you know, we were always taught you can kill a person but not the idea. An idea is very powerful. So we, my growing up experience was to not walk past social injustice, to at least be aware of it. And I guess I always had, I was always outraged when I saw really powerful people trample on people without power. And so pretty, pretty. previous to this, I actually had got involved in some social justice issues, some of them through my work. So we had, one of the things I hated was corporate white collar crime at a high level. And I'd read a book about it by a very respected Australian journalist called Chris Masters called White Stains on the collar, sorry, stains on the white collar, about how much money we lose through corporate crime, but because these are people in suits, they get light sentences or next to no censure, whereas someone breaks into a bank, they're away. for 20 years. So I had, back in my satirical days, we had a famous Australian businessman called

Christopher Scase, who stole a lot of money from a lot of people, took himself off to Spain where he couldn't be extradited, and then claimed to be too ill to come back to Australia. Now, in fairness, it turned out he was ill, but nonetheless, he escaped all consequences. So one of the things I did is I had a live two nights a week TV show, and I started a public fundraising campaign, which was heavily subscribed. We raised our money very quickly to hire a bounty hunter to bring him back from Spain. And we actually found the bounty hunter, a man that looked like Kenny Rogers, lived in America, who'd helped get Manuel Noriega. And it became a huge public issue. And in fact, I remember there was an article about it in the Wall Street Journal.

And they interviewed me and they said, Mr. Scacer said to you, if you set foot in Spain, you're going to spend the rest of your life in a small and dark place and I responded, well, my life's already a small and dark place, so it doesn't matter. But that was an early example. There many years later, and this was partly personal, and I won't go into the deep reasons, but there's a football team I've supported all my life. They're the oldest football team in this code. They're the working class team and then the indigenous football team. Rupert Murdoch, Australia's greatest toxic export to the world. Yeah, sorry, everyone.

Yeah, really sorry about that. He kicked that team out because he took over the competition just to try and create something that could drive an audience to pay television. I'm trying to say this in a very short way. But normally when Rupert Murdoch does something, that's it, game over. But in fact, this community, many of whom were my age and older, they took to the streets. they'd be the biggest street march

as seen in Australia since the Vietnam War Yes, I remember It was a huge issue and I was on the radio at the time and I became very, very vocal about it to a point where I had people in my industry calling me up and saying

you need to pull back but I didn't and I remember sitting with my wife and talking about this one day because I knew this is a very powerful organisation I worked in the media that this was potentially going to really cost me and it did in some ways but in the end we all moved through it.

Why were you prepared to do it? I saw such social injustice. Yes, it was about my football team initially, but what I actually saw, I remember there was a street march from Redfern, which is in Sydney, which still is, but particularly at the time, it was very working class, very indigenous. It was a poor part of Sydney,

and we marched from there up to the steps of the town hall, and it was 60,000 people. people. It was a sea of flags as far as you could see. And my wife who hates football came with me. She calls football. She just calls it that awful noise. She came with me and she saw this and she said, I see what you mean. I said, yes, this is the small end of town walking up to the big end of the town to say, you're taking away something that doesn't belong to you. Very long story short. In fact, ultimately that cause prevailed. And it was one of the few times Rupert Murdoch was literally taken to court by his own readers and his own viewers.

And they didn't lose in the court, but they lost so badly in the court of public opinion. They had to fix the situation. And so I realized then that there was abultuousness in me, which is fearlessness is not the right word. Because anyone who's fearless isn't paying attention, fearlessness is being afraid and still doing it. And I had an element of that. And I probably went further in some instances. There are some things I did where I was so balshy. I looked back in it now and think, no, that was too far,

which certainly helped me when it came to the advocacy for voluntary, since the dime because I had a great, that's what I meant about anger being a great fuel with a terrible compass. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, like, it's also, it's not, like you talk yourself as an amateur. I think many of us think of us ourselves as amateurs, maybe not me now. I have been doing this for quite a while.

But a lot of people, when they jump into change, making, think of it as new, but actually there are the seeds, there are all these seeds in our life. There are seeds of experience that we draw on sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously in the battles that we fight. Also, in the assisted dying campaign, I was joined by and joined with a lot of people who were way more amateur than me. And we were joined together by the one thing, which is we had experience. a terrible death of somebody in our lives.

And what I saw there, so our main opponents are actually with the Catholic Church in many guises, and we can come to that. But the Catholic Church, the oldest continuous institution in the world, there's a reason where they are. They're very powerful, very resourced,

very used to winning. And they have opened door to pretty much any politician in Australia, but they completely underestimated who they were up against because what they were up against were people who were so damaged by what had happened that nothing was going to turn them away. Nothing was going to turn them away from what they were arguing for.

And if I may digress ever so slightly, I launched a book for Helen Caldicott some years ago. So I like people that tilt justly against windmills and there's something about Helen. Or in her case, she's still tilting in support of windmills. That's right. Exactly, very good. And there's something about Helen, and she would say this itself.

She is, in Paul Keating's definition, a bit of a maddy, you know, as in that definition is the people had changed the world of the maddies, the ones that just go for it. Anyway, I told the story in there of a man called Vasili Matroken, who was a file clerk in Russia for the KGB. And one day, and the things he was filing were basically people's lives, people that had been sent to the gulags and worse. And one day for reasons, which were never, I read his obituary, this is how I knew, which were never fully explained, he decided to take a file home with him under his coat, and then

another, and then another, and then another. And knowing that the minute he was caught, he was a dead man. And when he had defected to the west with these boxes of files, it was at the time and may still be the greatest single intelligence cache handed over to the West in Russia's history. And I cite of Vasily Matrogan because I said, this is the smallest man in the biggest system. And it just reminds you however big a system there is, however big the wall or the fence, there's a weak point somewhere. And he spent the rest of his life in witness protection.

He died peacefully, but he did an extraordinary thing. And to me there's two things in that. yes, there's a crack in the system, and all of us can do something. We often don't think that we have power, and sometimes there's this narrative of powerlessness, but actually, and sometimes we don't have a lot of power. Yes. But there is, we never denied any agency. There is something we can do.

Absolutely right. And it's true that maybe most of us don't have a lot of power, but that's, and one of the big things that we did in our campaigning was to connect a lot of people. so collectively they took on a lot more power. And I think that's so key, if you're trying to change something, is to find the people who agree with you. Yep. So let's go through this extraordinary campaign, right?

So you have this experience, both with your father and reflecting on the fact that it didn't need to be this way because in Holland it was different, right? And I think that those two things are really important. Like bad things happen, but a sense of hope often comes from the fact that there's a concrete understanding that things can. could be different. And this came in part when you're doing the podcast. Like tell us, like the pod, to me, the podcast, you do this amazing podcast, you can still get it online. I've been

re-listening to it. It's, I won't say it's great because it's really depressing. It's hard. It's called Better Off Dead. There's two series, but the first series is the one that really informs this. So again, I had no idea this was going to transpire, but I ended up spending eight months pretty much full time on it. And I interviewed people all over the place. And I was very lucky. My starting point was the first and only anti-yuthanasia convention, international one, ever to happen in Australia.

Yes. And they very kindly invited me along and made me very welcome. And I was so new to this question, I didn't know what the arguments against were. And it was brilliant because I got this three-day tutorial. I didn't go there to argue the toss. I went there to ask questions. Listen, yeah. And I took all these notes and I recorded these interviews.

And in fact, I used their criticisms and claims and concerns as my roadmap to then go, well, I'm going overseas. This is what they say is happening. What they say is wrong. What they say is the danger. I'm going to use these as my basis. Yeah. Are they true or not? Is this misinformation or this real, right?

I didn't go to prove my view. I went to examine what they were telling me. And it proved to be such a great way to do it. So over the course of the eight months, I then came back to Australia, and the more I spoke to people, the more I realised there are other people I needed to speak to. And I managed to sit down and speak to people right across the spectrum, including the person that had set up the convention at the conference, a man called Paul Russell, who came from the Catholic Church,

from the DLP, which was the political wing of the Catholic Church, who was a very nice man, and we'd got on quite well. I came right back around at the end to interview him based on everything I'd learned. And in particular, I've been given a book by this sort of urgent, pasty-faced Canadian man called Alex Chardonberg, who I came to nickname Alex to Pope Shardenberg because he'd met not one but two popes. Well done, Alex. And he'd written this book exposing the truth of what was happening in Europe under these laws. People being killed without their consent.

statistics, research papers, and I went away thinking, well, if any of this is true, then this is a serious issue. Anyway, over a long period of time and with help from a very senior academic in Tasmania, we essentially went back and realized that the research papers he were drawing from were very real. He hadn't just cherry-picked the statistics, which is easy to do, but he deliberately left out their conclusions, which were the opposite to what he was saying. So when I sat down with Paul, I actually stepped in through it. And to go back to this idea of anger is a great fuel with a terrible compass, I worked incredibly hard in preparation and in that interview at no point to be anything other than low-key and friendly.

And so I would read out, I'd read out various examples. Alex Scharnberg said this, but this is actually what the report said. And it wasn't like gotcha. I'd just say, it's a puzzling admission. Why would that be, do you think? And always with that tone. So it was a very long journey and what I saw happening in my own country. And it still actually makes me angry, even though these laws have now passed.

Because I still get reports was that there were people and not a large percentage, but not a small number of people dying terrible deaths. in institutions, often faith-based institutions, which carry as their catchwords mercy. And I was seeing senior doctors going to parliamentarians when these laws have been discussed, presenting as doctors, but actually representing the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church runs a lot of our health care,

particularly for aged care and palliative care, and basically saying that's not happening or we can deal with it or I've never seen it or we have drugs, just give us more money and to me it was analogous, not the same but analogous with the child abuse inquiries these were people at the end of their lives and these were torturous deaths

I mean really, really shocking and one of the things we did in our campaign is we pulled together a book of testimonies from families and doctors and nurses called the damage done. And I said in the introduction, if all of these terrible, terrible stories had happened in one institution,

we would have had a royal commission into this years ago and the law would have changed overnight. But because they've all happened in individual places and the families are so traumatised. And it's sort of accepted. That's right, because that was the system.

Can't be a different system. And then the person dies, so it's not like they can give testimony about it. Exactly, right. There's a sort of horrible set of confluences that meant that changing it seems so difficult. And also, people then once it's done kind of wanted to forget it. Well, they're traumatized. Not to blame, right?

Like, actually just wanted to put it aside because it was so traumatic. And you're so powerless in this system. One of the people that ended up working with me was the former federal president of the AMA. He was instrumental in passing the first laws in Victoria. and he told me that when his dad died, even though he's the former head of the peak medical body in Australia and his sister as an experienced nurse, that they felt totally powerless in the hospital system.

So I saw this massive power imbalance. I saw the most vulnerable people, the terminally ill, the traumatized, the bereaved, and the Catholic Church and their representatives in medicine and almost every medical body in Australia and all the parliamentarians they had on tap both in the Labour and the Liberal Party and it was such a huge

and a deep social injustice such a huge power and balance and I thought I've got time I've got resources I have connections I have a certain level of reputation which will open doors and what I saw was

all the dying with dignity groups around Australia some of whom have been involved for 20 or 30 years in this fight and many of whom I came to know very well have huge respect for but they had old media skills yeah and they didn't have the kind of connections I had and they didn't have media skills and so I thought I'm going to level up the playing field I'm going to try to what I didn't have was political experience yeah yeah so I want to I want to I'm going to hopefully well you just keep wanting to jump a hand my answer is too long

no no no it's great it's beautiful I'm just trying to work out how to wind your fin No, no, no, no, no. I think everyone's going to want to listen to every word. I just think, let's start with this power imbalance question. So when, you know, I have done, you know, there's an approach in change making, which is you need to build your power to use your power. Yes. Right. And it strikes me that, you know, you've seen this power imbalance, a whole, a system, a lack of hope, isolated individuals in a traumatic moment, a sense that the system can't change, but you do have skills that could help change things. But obviously, as beautiful as you are, Andrew, you weren't going to be able to do it alone, right? So the art of changemaking is to build

this powerful network, build a set of alliances, build a base of relationships from which power can come. Clearly, the information gathering process started to solicit and identify people's stories. So you're already starting to identify with communities of people. How did you, I mean, you set up an organization really early on, going gentle, 2016. Go gentle. Go gentle. Sorry. That's right. I don't want to get it wrong. T.M. No, just kidding. Everyone can go look it up. Go gentle. Won't make the mistake again, promise. That's right. How, tell us more, I mean, you know, setting up an organization is one thing. Building a base of power from which to launch a campaign against something that people don't want to talk about, against which you've got a lot of powerful forces is another.

How did you go about building the kind of power that you might need? Well, first of all, as with almost everything, when I started my television production company, I made a business card and I said to my one associate, I wonder what we do now. So you usually, every, you start with one little step and then you just make the next one. So first of all, I had the unusual advantage. I had done something no one else in this country had ever done, which was I'd gone around and spoken to all the players. And what I saw was there were all these people that wanted this change the law, but who didn't really know each other. So there were. was that what I call kindling. That was a lot of kindling. Secondly, I worked on that series

with a brilliant journalist and producer who's also a friend who I'd worked with before, a woman called Bromond Reid. And she made my thinking a lot better than it would have been on my own. And her husband, who I also knew, who is a former journalist, but had some experience in politics as a man called David Hardacre. And so between the three of us, we decided let's set this up. So I think I must have been paying Bronwyn at that point. And I realized that there was the one medical organization in Australia that openly supported this change to the law

happened to be the biggest medical organization and the ones with the greatest public acceptance and that's the nurses union. Go nurses. Gosh, they're always on the right side. Oh, God, I love nurses. And so I thought that's the first place we'll go to for financial support because we needed to build a financial base.

I knew I was all in and that I was going to just, I didn't know how long I was going to take, but I was just going to commit myself to this. And I, so I was free. And I did. I worked round the clock for years. Bronwyn couldn't be that. She was going to donate what time she could,

but she couldn't work for free. You know, have it run lots of stuff. successful television minis, right? Like, you're going to need to change making, we talk about needs power. That's right. It's organized people, organize money. That's right.

It needs money. So I was very lucky I was financially independent. It would have been a lot harder if I wasn't. So we went to the nurses. I remember walking into the meeting before the meeting. I said to Bronwyn, I can't remember the figure now where I'll make it up. I said, I'm going to ask them for $120,000. And she said, oh, that's rather a lot.

And I said, because I think we talked about half. that figure. I said, I'm going to ask for double it. I said, just watch. And I don't know where I got this confidence other than the... Anger. Anger. No, actually, not in this case. First of all, I just like the nurses. And because professionally I'm used to dealing with lots of people and mostly, when I like people, I really like people and I usually get on pretty well. And I just had a sense that the then-president nurses, Lee Thomas, I was just going to get on with it. So I walked in and we talked about it and basically we got to the how much and I said the figure and she just looked at me and she went cheeky and uh because that is a solid amount it was a solid amount

now uh I don't know if they gave us the full amount it was close to it but and this gets back to being um I'm a very anal organized person and I put high store in professionalism so we didn't just and the nurses got involved with us on the ground in all sorts of ways. But I made sure that I went and gave them a full reporting on where their money had gone, on what had been effective, what hadn't. And that's one of the things,

I think the absolute key to any change-making is you've just got to be relentless. And you've got to be relentless with your enemies and with your friends. And relentless means you be accountable, you're always available, you make that call, you put in that extra yard, because it all counts. So that's where we started.

And then there's probably, and I got very, very lucky, this was nothing to do with my show business career, or tangentially it was, I got to know a man who I won't name, but he's very senior in banking in New South Wales. And I got to know him socially, and we actually got on really well. And there must have been something in a conversation. And I can't tell you, Amanda, how often people now realizing what I've been involved with bring forward a story from their own family. And there must have been something in a conversation which made me think,

he's sympathetic to this, what I'm trying to do. And I don't know where I got this instinct, but it was the single smartest move I made in all of this. I really needed money to get going and to get started and to do the things we needed to do. And he's a wealthy individual, but I thought, I'm not going to ask him for money. So I went to him and I asked him what turned out to be so much a better question. I said, I need to raise money. What would you advise? And he, and I can't, I won't identify him, but he basically not only lent me his very swanky

boardroom, but he invited a lot of wealthy people, not all of whom wanted to sign up for this. and we had a series of lunches and some people signed up big time and other people didn't want to know but we had these quite unusual emotional conversations with some pretty powerful, well-known people crying and cheering

and but it was that and that was a case of a connection I didn't realize how good a connection was but he connected me with a whole lot of other people some of whom are still working with this today And that was, I guess that's an example of where there is the fortune of my position in society that I was able to go through that door. For sure, there's a lesson in it for all of us, though, which is that rather than asking someone

for something you define, you asked an open question about what was possible. And in the space of imagination, in this possibility between you, actually he stepped up in leadership to something that was more than you would have necessarily imagined. That's right. And the other lesson there is never assume. Never assume who's going to say no or yes. You don't know and you don't know how people may choose to or be able to help you. That's the other thing.

You know, and I think in this issue, one of the great strengths we had is that there's no one that isn't invested in the question of death because we're all going. We're all going to die. sad, but it's true. You know, I often say to climate change activists, it seems to me the number one card you have to play is the children or grandchildren of the people you're speaking to because there's nobody that doesn't want their future to be good. And that's the universal card. And there's that great one-line of joke, I hope I die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather,

not screaming in terror like his passengers. Oh. And I will use that. jokes sometimes and say nobody wants to die screaming and everybody gets that so um you never know who's going to step forward so don't be afraid if if if your argument is reasonable you know when i went to oregon which is where these laws have the closest to australia had existed for 20 years when i started in this i went to speak to an attorney called eli stutzman who had helped frame their laws and He was a very – what was he? He was a particular church. It wasn't Lutheran, but it was an unusual church. It wasn't Amish. And he was a very straight up and down, attorney kind of man, not a radical by any means, really methodical. And their laws are quite conservative, which is the only thing that was going to get through. And he said something to me, which was great advice. He said, our approach was, if you allow our opponents, their reasonable objections, as in the

there's space to object, and if what you put forward is moderate and sensible, then you've got a good chance of success. And there's a number of people on my side of this argument don't necessarily agree with me. But certainly in this country, I firmly believe from what I've seen that change comes from the centre. It doesn't mean that a radical push from one side of the other can't force the centre to move, but actual change can't. We're a centrist society. And the very few times we've gone, in a federal sense, strongly left or right, left being Gough Whitlam, right being Tony Abbott, we corrected very quickly. And even if you don't agree with that, right, journalists think, the idea of being pragmatic,

which is that there's, as long as you can allow space for there to be disagreement, but that there can be a way to move a practical change forward. A practical, you know. I got why doctors and others were against this. The point I'd always make is, I have no issue with your opposition. What I do have an issue with is you imposing your opposition on everyone else. And so it's, sorry, I'm giving a very long answer. I'll shut up now.

As I say, I don't think people are going to want to hear more from me in this conversation, my friend. We've built our power base, Andrew. Then we need to work out who we're targeting. And one of the things that struck me about this campaign is that it was very focused on who it was targeting as in there were there were politicians who were making decisions it wasn't it didn't try and influence everyone it knew who it had to target who did you focus on and why and how what was the role of targeting in in this well again uh and this gets back to being to be very careful to not go down your own rabbit hole one of the problems i saw because there'd been almost 50 attempts

to legalize this before i got involved is that i saw on our side and i think think this is common in many causes. The belief that the inherent rightness of your cause meant that it would succeed. And again, because I went to that anti-euthanasia convention, on the last night there was a dinner. And just to put people in the picture, Australia actually was the first country in the world to pass a law for a sister dying. It was in the Northern Territory. It was this extraordinary man called Marshall Perron, who was the chief minister, who just took it upon himself to do this thing. But under Australian the Australian Constitution, a territory as opposed to a state, its laws can be overruled by

the federal government. And the federal government of the time was conservative, and that's exactly what they did. And at this dinner, one of the behind-the-scenes architects, a Catholic priest, talked about their tactics, how they had got this through the parliament. And he said, we were just ruthless. We worked out who we needed to target, and that's all we did. We didn't waste. We weren't trying to speak to Australia at large. We were speaking to 87 people or whatever it was. And you're there busily taking notes. I did. I took notes with all of it. And so just to give people a clear framework, the law passed in Victoria in 2017 after a long and very, very fierce and bitter campaign. But I got involved the year before in South Australia

where for the 17th time their parliament failed to pass the law by the casting vote of the Christian Speaker at the House at 3 o'clock in the morning. It was going to go up to the upper house, but anyway, that's by the by right now. And that was where I literally had no idea what I was doing. I walked into that. I was with David Hardacre,

who had more of a sense of how to build a political coalition. I remember I walked into the South Australian Parliament House and uniquely at that point, both the Premier, man called Jay Weatherill and the leader of the opposition, did support the legislation. And again, because of my profile, I was able to speak with both these men. And to give the leader of the opposition, the Liberal Stephen Marshall, he came and had breakfast. I basically went and lived in Adelaide. He basically came and had breakfast with me three times off his own bat. And I had the bizarre experience of because I was known, I essentially camped

in Parliament House and people would lend me their offices and then walk me around to meet another MP. Now that doesn't happen to everyone. It was also, I've now been in every state Parliament House and South Australia's is fascinating. It's like a big clubhouse. It's very unusual. Where was I going with all of that? Oh, it's just about being open to, I got as much from talking to people that didn't agree. I always sought out the conversation. You know, one of the strongest groups that were against this, there was a very vocal group of disability advocates. And they were certainly the most aggressive towards me. And in fact, in South Australia, after a media appearance, I was walking away from the steps

of Parliament House and a woman came up to me in a wheelchair and said, Andrew Denton. I said, yeah. She said, you're trying to kill me. And we've become frenemies. Her name's Sam Conoran. She's a really powerful voice for disability. Anyway, I went and sat with her and some of her friends. Dave and I sat with them for a couple of hours.

And it was such an education, and not just with them, such an education into the disempowerment they feel at the hands of the medical community, which is very real. And the assumptions made on their behalf, which are very real. And I could totally understand where their anxieties were coming from, except I had done something that they hadn't done. I had gone and sat with peak disability advocacy groups in countries where these laws exist.

I took all the questions from that anti-Euthanasia conference about all the terrible things that were happening and I didn't add anything to the... I just said, I want to ask you some questions, has this been happening? Are you aware of this? And it was just a blanket no. We've seen no evidence of any of this.

And then, and again, I wasn't trying to lead them to this. I remember the guy in the Netherlands, he kind of got a bit indignity and said, no, you don't understand. These laws empower our members. So I learned by spending the time to listen very carefully to people's opposition because some of their opposition came from a very genuine place. And to ignore that or to not be aware, of it was deeply insulting.

I was never going to get them to agree with me, nor me with them. But you should always do people the respect of listening. Because sometimes, and what that did, that enabled me in Victoria to be one of the people that strongly urged them to, there was an expert panel that devised the law, to make sure there was a disability advocate on that panel. Yeah. That was both politically smart and also. the reasonable thing to do.

Yeah, and ready to negotiate. That's right. Politics is a negotiation. Absolutely. And I think the, so I always argued I'd rather have 100% of something, sorry, 90% of something than 100% of nothing. Yeah. And there are people in the advocacy space for whom it's got to be 100% or nothing at all.

And I don't think nothing at all is acceptable change. That's what I mean about comes from the middle. It's sometimes incremental. It's often not everything you want. it's better than nothing. And what I think is also true of the, like, you know, there's been a lot of reflection by your team about what happened in those different meetings.

The process of listening and not assuming was important for other advocates, and it was important for the politicians as well, to not assume that just because someone was X, that they'd think X, on either side of this debate. Exactly right. And this being a conscience debate and this being about something deeply emotional and often informed by people's personal experiences. Yeah, yeah.

So these days there's a big conversation about misinformation, right? You know, you'd go on the internet and who you're not ever sure if what's happening. In this debate, there was a lot of misinformation. A huge amount. How did you deal with that? I mean, I think you've already talked about your strategy. Have you mentioned the stone strategy yet? No, no, no.

So I coined the phrase, no stone unturned, no turd unstone. And that essentially gets back to relentlessness. We and me personally, and I think we, because we came from a professional base, we really started to instill this in the advocacy groups, which was you don't leave anything unanswered, whether it's a letter in the Geelong advertiser or it's a submission to parliament, you respond to everything. And it wasn't just about correcting misinformation. It was also about showing, no, you don't get the field to yourself anymore and you're never going to get the field to yourself again. One of the reasons these laws hadn't passed is that those debates that sort of happened in Parliament. There was some publicity around them, but not much. And what we did is we put a huge spotlight on them.

So in South Australia, the first time we get involved, the other thing I was able to do because one of the shows I'd created was about advertising. I knew a lot of people in advertising. And unlike many people in my industry, I have a lot of respect for good advertising. There's a reason many of our best and brightest are there. They're very, very good at persuasion. And we came up with a campaign in South Australia, which turned out to be not as well targeted as we needed,

but also was wildly effective. There was a young woman dying of breast cancer called Kylie Monaghan. She fronted this for us, and it was called Be the Bill. And it was essentially you could, she called it, this is my bill to change the law. You can write your own name in here and send it into South Australia's Parliament House. Anyway, it was so effective.

It literally melted down the switchboard. And some MPs thought this was very impressive and some thought this was terrible. Anyway, the point being, that was about be relentless, be out there. And I think that made a big difference. So one of the things we did in Victoria, it was expensive, and probably it was, in terms of changing anybody's votes, it probably didn't have much impact. But just on the day of the debate, we paid for full-page ads in both the broadsheet and the tabloid newspaper in Melbourne.

And we did that because looking back at the history, which is also something else we've done, we looked at the history of these campaigns in, I think it was Tasmania just before. their parliament failed by one vote to pass this legislation. The opposition forces ran this full-page ad, lawyers and doctors and so on. And one of the, there was a brilliant advertising man in Australia called Neil Lawrence who ran the campaign that got the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd elected and then ironically ran the campaign that helped get him removed for the Mining Council of Australia, ran the I still call Australia home campaign for Qantas. And he was a very, very, very smart guy.

And sadly, he died just before we really got started because he was going to help us. But he had a dictum, which is it's not what politicians think. It's what they think everyone else thinks. And so we ran these two full-page ads the day before the debate was due to start. And because we had very good connections inside the Liberal Party room, the libs were the problem, but it was a conscience vote. All MPs voted for and against, but they were more politically, structurally opposed. We knew that the discussion was, wow, if they've got these resources to do this, what other resources do they have? So it was about always front-up,

always be there, and sometimes it was in deeply granular detail. You know, there was a, these parliamentarians didn't inquiry long before this became a law, which read recommended there be a law, but there were two dissenting MPs, and one of whom wrote this very long rebuttal explaining all the reasons you shouldn't have this law. And myself and a researcher, we spent two months writing an 80-page response to his report, which we distributed to MPs. And there were two reasons for doing that. One, it was actual information. And the other was it was important to always be credible, not just appear to be credible,

but to be able to show, no, we've done our homework. And in the end, you'll make your decision. But when we give you a piece of information, it's not a distortion. Yep, yep. So let's, I want people to understand the scale of change that you've helped contribute

with a massive team, but you've helped us. And many politicians and doctors and nurses. All the people, all the people. But, you know, sometimes changed us with, a single mover and then and then and then start with me but i accelerated it i would say that yeah yeah didn't yeah that's i think that's a it's a lovely point so south australia was defeated victoria you won in 2017 then w a in 2019 in 2021 tasmania south australia queensland 22 in new south wiles

aside from the territories and we know the difficulty of the territories you've actually done the whole thing you've taken death this issue of death which no one wants to talk about and you've actually created an enabled a right for people to be able to choose how it happens to them, if and when they're at the point of where they're unwell. I mean, there's still guidelines around that law. Not everybody can do it. You have to be terminally ill and, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, yes, you drive on the center of the road, I hear you, right?

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you. How did achieving, like, how did achieving all of this change? I mean, really, it's quite, I mean, it must have felt long, also must have felt, it's extraordinary. Most people don't actually do this. How did even all this change change you? Well, I'm still engaged. I still probably work two days a week. There are still problems and issues and challenges. But certainly, I had a very blessed media career. I mostly worked with great people. I had sufficient success. I had some very interesting

failures. I got everything I wanted out of that. So to get a second act, which is far more meaningful. And I still get them and we still get them and they still make me very emotional people describing what it means to them to have this choice when they're dying or what it meant to their families, the person they loved was able to die peacefully on their own terms. And I compare that to people I sat with us. They were dying and the fear and the horror they went through, let alone my own father's experience. I can't tell you. Even if nothing further happens with these laws and things do need to happen. I and the people I've worked with, we all know that we were part of something

which will fundamentally change people's lives for generations. And that's, you can't get better than that. You can't get better than that. And because that's where anger is a fuel is so great. All of us did it for exactly the right reasons, which is this is wrong, this needs to change. no one was doing it, you know, for publicity, which I was sometimes accused of,

in fact, the number of times I've declined fronting shows about death because I'm saying, I don't want to be Mr. Death. Get other things too. I'm still alive. Look, yeah, it's really powerful. And I can't tell you how often I and we get told things by people about what happened at the end of their mother's life or their father's life and what it meant.

And that's, and every now and then, because we've got this great board and I'll send a story on and say this is, this is why we've done all of this. So that's, that is really brilliant. And plus, to go back to where you started, there is still, you know, well, I'll be up front. I think the power of particularly the Catholic Church in this country has been, and in many ways remains very problematic. and I described them as the most powerful non-elected political party in Australia. They're a very political organisation. You know, the hard men and the high hats, as I call them, the archbishops and the bishops, they're politicians and they are very good at what they do and they're ruthless at what they do.

And I think they have done as an institution, I think their social justice program and a lot of what they do is magnificent and brilliant. and I would never want to overlook that or suggest that doesn't exist. But I think conversely, because of their hardline doctrine and because of the fact they are so used to being in power and having power and access to power, they have also done an enormous amount of damage to an enormous amount of lives and people in this country.

And so I feel personally glad that I picked such a worthy adversary people that require challenging and still require challenging. Yeah. And that's not about personal belief. I don't care what you think about God or that these ceremonies are important to you. That's yours. That's important to you and I accept that. It's actually about how you act as a citizen. In this case, what I consider a corporate citizen in our society and how you treat others. And I think these institutions, I'm obviously singling out the Catholic Church is the most powerful, but they're not the only ones. they remain problematic and they require ongoing scrutiny. And so my last question. So we've got people listening to this episode who probably think, oh, I couldn't do that. I can't make change.

I've just been doing X and Y and there are niggles in my life, but I don't know how to confront them. What would you say to those listeners who think that they can't do it? You have no idea how much power you're carrying. If you feel so strongly about an issue that you're actually sitting here listening to this podcast and thinking, how do I go about it, you're already ahead of 95% of the population. As I said before, until you take that first step, you have no idea what the second step looks like. But I guarantee you that that second step will involve someone else that feels the same way you do

and then someone else and then someone else and then someone else. and I spent a lot of my career interviewing people at the top of all kinds of traits and trees and many of whom you think would be masters of the universe and they had one thing in common no matter who they were which is they always worked harder than the next person no matter what that achieved but the other thing which struck me again and again and again and it speaks my own experiences they also started out not knowing what they were doing so I truly believe that if you're committed, if you allow your anger or passion to be your fuel, not your compass,

and if you stay open, and if you stay in the middle, and by the middle I don't mean you compromise everything, but you understand that you may win everything, but you may not, and to be okay with that, as long as you're moving your cause forward, to stay a reasonable person,

even with those who disagree with you, And there were times, and I did lose my call sometimes, and there were times where certainly privately I got very angry and emotional, but I think everything is possible. And sometimes it just takes time, the times to change. But you'd be amazed, you know, we are a centrist country, and people are way smarter than they're often than that casual slander that, oh, Australians are, you know, they're not very good of talking and they're not very engaged. You'd be amazed how engaged people are and can be.

So trust yourself, trust to the people around you, trust the change is always possible, and trust that we are still, for all our faults, a pretty decent society. And people want good things to happen. Yeah. And trust you'll be able to work it out as you go along. Absolutely. No plan was, you know, work it out as you're going, build the plane while you're flying it. And you're going to make mistakes.

We certainly made mistakes and we learn from some of them. And I guess there's got to be humility in that too. Yeah, yeah. Andrew, it has been a pleasure. You're a very funny man and I'm glad that you're also the man who's changed how we might die. I am relieved and appreciative as a fellow citizen. Well, thank you, Amanda. I hope you die soon.

No, no, that's not. That's not the answer. No, sorry, I've got that completely wrong. We record that. Thank you so much. No stone unturned, no turd unstoned. Appreciate it. ChangeMakers is hosted by me, Amanda Tattersall. Remember to subscribe to this podcast to catch all of our episodes.

This is series eight, so there's plenty to be inspired by in our back catalogue. ChangeMaker's audio producer is Jules Walker. We are broadcast on A-Cast and a part of the Archonaution. Class Network. Changemakers UK episodes are supported by the Civic Power Fund and work with the University College London Policy Lab. They bring together extraordinary ideas and everyday experience to understand how we can change the world. Check them out at UCL.ac.ac.ac.com slash policy dash lab and civicpower.org.org.com. Like us on Facebook, Instagram and threads at Changemakers podcast. We're on X Twitter at ChangeMakers 9-9 and I'm There Sometimes 2 at Amanda Tats.

And you can also check out Changemakerspodcast.org for transcripts and updates on all of our stories.