Inside the fight to restore territory rights

She cried. She drank champagne. And she started writing.

Cheyne penned a "remonstrance" motion, the most serious act of protest available to the ACT Legislative Assembly, to condemn the Federal Parliament's refusal to repeal the law which banned it from debating voluntary assisted dying.

The motion passed the following the day. Those up on the Hill were unmoved.

Not long after the Leyonhjelm vote in August 2018, the then ACT Labor backbencher created a spreadsheet to keep track of where MPs and senators might fall if and when another vote was held.

One fight had been lost, but the next was underway.

This was the cycle of the 25-year territory rights campaign.

Hope, despair, hope. Fight, lose, fight.

At 7.48pm on Thursday night, the cycle was broken.

Almost 9400 days since it passed the parliament, Kevin Andrews' bill quashing the NT's euthanasia laws and banning the territories from legislating them again, was overturned.

Cheyne, now the ACT's Human Rights Minister, witnessed the final vote from the Senate's public gallery, as did former NT chief minister Marshall Perron, the architect of the legislation the Andrews bill revoked.

"We are indebted to the hundreds of thousands of people who for so long have not given up," Cheyne said after the vote.

In a special report to mark the end of this masthead's Our Right to Decide campaign, The Canberra Times can reveal the inside story of how the final chapter in the political campaign was fought and won.

In the end, as is often the case, the Federal Parliament simply caught up with the public.

Starting with Victoria in 2017, the passing of assisted dying laws in each state reflected a shift in sentiment on a sensitive, but no longer radical, practice.

When NSW became the final domino to fall earlier this year, Andrews' old argument that only a reckless and immature parliament would countenance assisted dying laws had been shattered beyond repair.

Yet the ban he engineered in 1997, with the imprimatur of then prime minister John Howard, remained.

It would take the election of the Albanese government and the stunning political rise of a rugby superstar, spurred on by terminally ill Canberrans desperate for the right to choose how to end their life.

It would require a change of heart from some politicians.

It would mean overcoming the powerful forces that have fought to preserve the ban, including inside the Coalition and Labor, the pro-life movement and the Catholic Church.

At the end of another long sitting day earlier this week, Katy Gallagher paused to reflect on the territory rights campaign.

"At one level it is just mechanical and good [to get this done]," she told The Canberra Times in an interview for this article.

"At another level ... it is the reason I am in politics. When you see something that isn't fair, you change it."

Gallagher was in political exile, a victim of the section 44 saga, when the Leyonhjelm bill was defeated.

When she returned after the 2019 election, she accepted a tactical shift was needed to win a fight she'd been losing since her time as chief minister of the ACT.

She realised it was futile trying to bind the Labor caucus in support of repealing the Andrews bill. Some of her colleagues couldn't be convinced it wasn't about euthanasia, meaning a rare conscience vote was the only palatable option.

The second realisation was that only a party in government could achieve it.

"Whatever the Senate did was kind of irrelevant," she said.

"Because unless you had the support of the government of the day, to list a bill in the House of Representatives, nothing would happen."

The aim was to secure a commitment that a future Labor government would allow debate on the bill.

Anthony Albanese had raged against the Andrews bill as a rookie MP in 1997 and remains a personal supporter of territory rights. The then opposition leader was always going to lend a sympathetic ear.

If there was any doubt about his position, it evaporated during a speech to the ACT Labor conference on July 17, 2021.

Albanese roused the faithful with an address, which condemned then Liberal senator Zed Seselja as a "roadblock to the territory's right to legislate".

Labor agreed at a caucus meeting on October 26 that, if elected, it would prioritise debate on a private members' or senators' bill to restore territory rights.

Canberra MP Alicia Payne tried to convince her colleagues to vote as a bloc in support of territory rights - to no avail. She now accepts a conscience vote was the more practical option.

The next step was to win the election.

Two days before the May 21 poll, at a campaign pit stop in northern Tasmania, then prime minister Scott Morrison confirmed the Coalition had no interest in territory rights.

It would be up to Labor.

The federal election result was significant for another reason.

David Pocock's defeat of Seselja installed in the upper house a powerful territory rights supporter at the expense of one of its fiercest opponents.

Pocock seized on the issue during the election campaign, pledging to introduce his own repeal bill in his first weeks in parliament.

It put immediate public pressure on the incoming Albanese government, in particular Gallagher.

The Canberra Times understands the Pocock camp was keen for the process to start during the relative quiet of the Senate's opening weeks, hoping it could be dealt with before the upper house was swamped later in the year.

Labor chose a different route.

The new government's seven ACT and NT parliamentarians used Zoom meetings to discuss several options ahead of the Parliament's resumption in July, eventually agreeing that Luke Gosling, from the Darwin-based electorate of Solomon, and Payne would introduce a private members' bill in the lower house.

The Labor team tried to frame the debate exclusively around democratic rights, convinced that was their best chance of convincing those with reservations about assisted dying to support the bill.

Gosling and Bean MP David Smith proved it could be done. The two men championed territory rights despite their personal objections to euthanasia.

The private members' bill was brought forward on August 1 - the second Monday of the first sitting fortnight.

Things were moving quickly, thanks, in part, to a somewhat unlikely ally.

A young and ambitious Tony Burke was instrumental in encouraging Labor members to support Kevin Andrews' bill as the executive director of Euthanasia No.

He remains opposed to assisted dying and was one of five Labor MPs who voted against the Payne-Gosling bill.

But far from trying to frustrate the debate, the Leader of the House helped it along. Burke agreed the bill should be dealt with quickly, sources say. He had also accepted, they say, that the world had moved on.

The bill was introduced, debated and passed within three days.

The final count - 99 votes in support, 37 against - delivered the type of resounding win that supporters hoped would send a strong message to the Senate.

The speed with which it raced through the lower house also caught opponents off guard, denying them crucial time to lobby politicians who might be sitting on the fence.

But they would get their chance in the Senate - where the real battle would be fought.

On paper, Brendan Long is an unusual person to be leading the campaign to protect the Andrews bill.

A Canberran. A Labor member. A candidate in Andrews Barr's team at the 2020 ACT election.

But Labor is a broad church and Long is part of the Catholic wing which has long resisted policies such as assisted dying.

A veteran of the pro-life movement, he was drafted into the territory rights fight after leading the campaign against NSW's assisted dying legislation.

The no camp never had the numbers - both sides knew that. But it didn't stop them from fighting.

Long used his Labor links, including a long-standing relationship with right-wing powerbroker Don Farrell, and worked closely with Liberal Jonathan Duniam to corral "no" votes across the political divide.

Representatives from Australian Care Alliance and the Catholic Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn were also seen walking the Parliament House corridors.

On the other side, leading advocacy group Go Gentle Australia lobbied behind the scenes, helping Pocock and Gallagher's office where they could. But it otherwise kept a low profile.

There was no repeat of 2018, when parliamentarians landing in Canberra ahead of the Leyonhjelm vote were greeted with a banner which read: "Canberrans need assisted dying not assisted thinking".

The group's founder, television personality Andrew Denton, said Go Gentle didn't feel like it "needed to be in the room" because the government-backed bill had a strong chance of passing.

The Canberra Times can reveal state health ministers also discussed writing an open letter in support of repealing the Andrews bill, but decided against intervening in what was being treated as a conscience matter.

The nature of the Senate debate bought both sides time.

After racing through the lower house, the bill crawled along in one-hour increments after being introduced in the Senate.

The Pocock camp became agitated, publicly and privately expressing fears that delaying a vote could imperil its chances of success.

Gallagher defended the process.

"It sort of took some of the heat out of the debate," she said.

Of the more than 25 speeches on the bill in the Senate, two stood out and both represented major wins for the territory rights campaign.

The first was WA senator Pat Dodson, who declared he would abstain from the final vote during a speech which doubled as a withering attack on the Australian Christian Lobby.

The second was from another past "no" voter, Liberal senator Jane Hume. In a moving speech, Hume revealed she had changed her mind after her father was allowed a peaceful, pain-free death because of Victoria's euthanasia laws.

"Who am I to deny Territorians and Canberrans the choice to leave the earth in the same beautiful way"? she said.

On September 27, in the face of intensifying pressure from Pocock, Leader of the Government in the Senate Penny Wong pledged a vote would be held before the end of the year.

The numbers were there. The time was now. The end was nigh.

In the end, the spreadsheets Cheyne, Pocock and others had updated, checked and re-checked over recent months could be thrown out.

When the vote was called a loud chorus of "ayes" drowned out a handful of subdued "noes".

There was no need to tally the numbers.

The result was all but assured a week earlier after a resounding 41:25 second reading vote prompted opponents to concede defeat.

In what ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr described as the "final rearguard action" from conservatives, Duniam and NT Country Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, with Long's help, pushed to amend the bill to constrain future assisted dying laws in the territories. It failed.

A final vote could have taken place last week.

But one photo, taken just after 3.30pm on Thursday, proved it was fitting that it was delayed.

Assembled in the leafy courtyard outside the Senate were the human faces of the 25-year campaign, from the politicians and assisted dying advocates, to the terminally ill Canberrans for whom this fight has been personal, desperate and urgent.

But one person was missing.

Judy Dent, whose husband Bob was the first person to die under the NT's short-lived assisted dying legislation, was at home in Darwin.

She didn't watch the vote, only learning of the result as the congratulatory emails flooded her inbox late on Thursday night.

When the Andrews bill passed 25 years ago, Dent said her reaction was: "rude word, rude word, rude word".

After it was repealed, she was relieved. But it's not over.

Unlike in Canberra, the NT doesn't have a timeframe for developing assisted dying laws.

"This just means we start again," she said.