Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 11. The effect of the law was nullified in 1997 by the federal Parliament of Australia which passed the "Euthanasia Laws Act 1997". The Act continues on the Territory's statute books. Dr Philip Nitschke founded Exit International in response to the overturning of the Act. While voluntary euthanasia had previously been condoned officially in the Netherlands and the US state of Oregon, the act was the first time that a legislative assembly passed a law explicitly legalising euthanasia. The Act allowed a terminally ill patient to end their life with medical assistance, either by the direct involvement of a physician
Gerald A. Larue Humphry asked him to head it. Larue became founding president of the Hemlock Society aimed to provide information to the terminally ill and legalize physician-assisted suicide. "He stepped up to the plate when others were afraid," Humphry said. "He presided over Hemlock with great diplomacy when it was highly sensitive and controversial — when America was just beginning to address the subject of the hot-button topic of the right to choose to die when at life's end." Larue served for eight years, until Humphry moved the Hemlock Society to Oregon in 1988. Larue argued that the secular state must be