20 February 2008

Stanhope wants your body ...

| Ari
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… so he can perform gruesome medical experiments.

Nah, just kidding.

He’s actually just hitched himself to Organ Donation Week and made the usual public call for more donors.

He wants to have 100,000 Canberrans – almost one in three people – registered as potential donors. To date, 45,000 Canberrans are registered.

One simple way to boost donations from those already signed up would be to let the roads deteriorate further.

Meanwhile, the Canberra Times’ Economics Editor Peter Martin reckons the Dismal Science could be usefully employed to help fix the problem.

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who’s ‘they’, scum? and if you died and no-one else knew (or at least told) how would ‘they’ know anyway? what are you on about?

or are you maybe just on some homophobic rave? why do you assume no family anywhere would want a gay relation? hello? this is the real world now…

What they’re not telling you is that if you have had gay sex at any time in your life you cannot donate organs and if you do your children or other relatives could be liable for damages. Who wants to subject their family members to that possibility?

…and a state funeral for everyone who donates their entirety to science!

i wanna be plastinated by that dude in germany. how cool would that be!

V8 Berlina with a three tier spoiler4:51 pm 21 Feb 08

$1000, I could put my kidneys on eBay and get more

How about however many parts they take out, is $1,000 off your funeral expenses per part ?

I liked the suggestion made in the CT a few days ago. Offer a $20 tax rebate or somesuch if you sign up; people are always willing to do things if there’s a financial incentive, and the cost to the tax man would be insignificant against the costs to the health care system dealing with people sitting on transplant lists for years.

Ingeegoodbee8:51 am 21 Feb 08

You might be on to somthing wishuwell. Years ago I had a mate who neaded corneal transplants and was on a waiting list. There was a support group for intending organ donation recipients that held a cocktail party on the Thursday before Easter to cellebrate the fact that some of those gathered wouldn’t be needing the service of the support group in a weeks time!

Ingeegoodbee8:47 am 21 Feb 08

It’s easy enough to become a donor, but you’ve really got to get it sorted with your loved ones who still have a say. A lot of people believe that the organ donation happens exclusively after you’re pronounced dead which isn’t necessarily the case. A lot of the really useful organs will come out while the donor is still alive and they’re maintained on life support – giving consent to that is often a big ask for family faced with the fact that they’re losing a loved one. They need to know how much it would mean to you to be able to donate your organs before you get to that stage.

There seems to be an direct connection between modern day car safety impacting on lowering the road toll and more people on transplant waiting lists for longer periods of time. Once was a time when you did something stupid in a car you didn’t get a second chance. But yeah donate your organs, not as though there doing you much good once your dead!

astrojax, i think the implied consent policy would be the way to go as it is, i suspect, more sheer laziness that stops people signing up with the register. i can’t understand why else people don’t do it, you’re going to be dead anyway, it won’t make any difference to you then! i’m betting people who have some bizarre reason for not donating their own organs wouldn’t turn down an organ for themselves, their family, their nearest and dearest if THEY needed one. it takes 5 minutes max to fill out the form and pop it in the postbox, they will send you a card, stick it in your wallet and just tell those who matter (who might be asked when it matters) that you are an organ donor.

gordon brown, england’s PM, is canvassing the idea of implied consent, meaning stanhope could adop this and have all 300k of us donors unless we act to opt out. that is, everyone is a donor by default and to stop them harvesting you when you shuffle off the mortal coil, go to meet your maker, join the choir invisible (and so on – you all know the parrot sketch) you have to sign up, instead of te other way round we have now…

V8 Berlina with a three tier spoiler10:37 pm 20 Feb 08

“Stanhope want’s your body…”

Eeeewww, that’s almost as scary as a rumour that was going around after xmas that at a departmental xmas party with booze and karaoke, he chose to do a rendition of Justin Timberlake “Sexy Back”.

I said YES on the driver licence years ago, but that scheme lapsed. Just discovered by accident that its now on the medicare form, the advertising has completely missed me.

45/300k is way over the Oz %.

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