How can Nancy Crick and Alec Campbell both be "classic Aussie battlers"?

It was a weird coincidence. On the same day that we read that the 69-year-old Gold Coast grandmother had cut short her life, they buried the last veteran of Gallipoli, a digger who had stretched out his life to the ripe old age of 103.

The stark contrast between these two lives highlights the fact that the legalisation of euthanasia would alter many of our precious national values beyond recognition.

Mrs Crick's elaborate website, www. nancycrick.com, set up for her by Exit Australia, has posted a defiant obituary describing her as a brave pathfinder, a martyr, a representative of "a proud and persistent tradition of dissent in Australian history".

Like the swagman in "our de facto national anthem", it rhapsodises, she leapt into the arms of death rather than fall into the clutches of tyrannical politicians and clerics. "She was feisty; she was pugnacious," commented Dr Philip Nitschke, the leader of Australia's euthanasia movement.

On the other hand, Alec Campbell's obituary also painted him as a feisty character. A modest man who never regarded himself as a hero, in and out of uniform he symbolised the Anzac virtues. They could not be further from those eulogised by Exit Australia.

As the official World War I historian C.E.W. Bean wrote, "Anzac stood and still stands for reckless valour in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship and endurance that will never admit defeat."

Eight thousand Anzacs died with dignity at Gallipoli on what has often been described as a "suicide mission" - but their suicide had nothing to do with Nancy Crick's farewell to suffering. In the face of death from Turkish rifles, death from thirst, or death from dysentery they battled on and on and on.

The soldiers of that generation weren't just tough. They knew that the quality of a life is measured in part by capacity for endurance in the face of hardship, however awful it might be. How many POWs asked for euthanasia on the Burma Railway? How many did Weary Dunlop euthanase?

Euthanasia also requires a reinterpretation of mateship. In the Anzac tradition we have the heroic Simpson lugging his wounded mates on a donkey through the chaos of Anzac Cove, bullets whistling around him until he catches one himself.

In Exit Australia's updated version of mateship, however, Nancy Crick's 21 mates gathered round her bed in the hope that she would kill herself. What would Simpson have thought of this?

Let's keep our language clear and unambiguous. Otherwise, the meaning of sturdy, rough-hewn words like gutsy and brave will be at risk of dissolving into a porridge of double-speak.

To adapt George Orwell's famous words about the gobbledegook of Communist and Fascist officialdom, the language of euthanasia "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". If we are going to carry on a national debate about euthanasia, the first step is not to muddy the waters by calling suicide courage and killing compassion.

It demeans generations of Australians to describe both Alec Campbell and Nancy Crick as classic Aussie battlers. Nancy Crick's heroism in scoffing a glass of nembutol isn't just a different kind of heroism. It's not heroism at all. By Anzac standards her suicide was cowardice.

But instead of quibbling over words, I suggest that Dr Nitschke be asked to invent some new ones. The quality of mind needed to participate in mercy killing is such a novel way of thinking that it deserves a few novel contributions to the dictionary.