The Japanese earthquakes have caused distressing numbers of immediate deaths.

Will they be followed by a further, ongoing – currently unpredictable – death toll?

Friday’s quake damaged a cooling system at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

20-plus people have been taken to hospital due to having been exposed to radioactivity.

Over 100,000 people have been evacuated from the vicinity.

The Australian Greens Party leader, Bob Brown, says this proves that nuclear reactors are too dangerous for use in generating electricity – that nuclear energy is “outside the limits of human safeguards”.

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Senator Brown conceding that there are limits to human safeguards?

Talk about a forked tongue.

When Brown discusses euthanasia, he says the opposite.

He and his Greens colleagues are forever sponsoring private members’ bills for legalising euthanasia.

Such bills always include “human safeguards” which, they assure us, are of infallible reliability — beyond all limits.

Yesterday this blog quoted a British poll which found 77 percent of people having apparently swallowed such propaganda — agreeing that people with “intolerable terminal illnesses” should be “helped to end their life”.

More deception.

What does “intolerable terminal illness” mean?

Doesn’t it simply mean terminal illness in a situation where no proper palliative care services are available to make the situation tolerable?

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We Australians have a decision facing us.

We can be a society that provides palliative care, with specialist-level support in the form of pain-relief, nursing, counselling and spiritual resources . . . .

Or we can be a society that provides lethal syringes and lethal pills.

We cannot be both – the two cannot coexist.