A local doctor believes everyone deserves the right to choose a "good death".
While palliative care eased symptoms such as pain, nausea and breathlessness - there were a small number of people whose suffering could not be alleviated.
The very best care can't fix profound weakness, fatigue or the despair that comes with losing the ability to communicate, eat, walk, go to the toilet.
"Sometimes medical interventions do not improve the quality of our lives, they merely prolong our dying," Dr Libby Smales says.
There's a national and international shortage of trained workers in palliative care - yet where aid in dying is legalised those services are better funded.
"Everyone knows the difference between a good death and a bad one, I believe we all have the right to choose a good death".
A recent poll of New Zealanders showed 80 per cent agreed with a need for both good palliative care and the choice to access aid in dying.
Dr Smales felt our unregulated system was lacking and could do much better.
"We see helping someone to die when and how they choose, when their suffering is unbearable to them and hopeless in that we have no cure as part of the spectrum of care that should be available here as it is in several other jurisdictions already."
During a "end of life choice" meeting at Tamatea Community Church yesterday, internationally renowned Dr Rob Jonquiere addressed a crowd of more than 100 on the topic. Now retired, he began working out of Hengelo in the Netherlands where during the 1970s he set up patient "life crises" participation events.
He explained the lengthy and involved process doctors went through with their patients in making decisions around euthanasia - it must be well considered, informed and all other options exhausted. It was an explicit request from the person concerned, not their children, family or caregivers.
"I'm never that surprised [when they ask] because you have been looking after the patient during the illness ... there also needs to be an agreement within the family. Another major criterium - there must be hopeless suffering, not normal suffering, it must be unbearable."
Dr Jonquiere has travelled around the world giving presentations on euthanasia and has been to New Zealand before.
He is currently the communications director of the World Right to Die Organisation.
His words rang true with Pauline Tangiora, who sat in the second row listening intently. When approached afterwards she recalled the passing of her Dutch sister-in-law in a Holland hospital as an example of "death with dignity".
"It's beautiful, the family were with her, they were laughing, she was able to say goodbye then gave the doctor a nod to release the injection and she went to sleep - she had cancer of the spine.
"The choice to die is a clear choice, it's nothing to do with religion, fundamentalists would say it's against God's wishes but if you read the Bible it talks about making good choices."
Labour MP Iain Lees-Galloway, who has been pushing for an "end of life choice" bill, also attended. "The correspondence we got when looking at the bill was 80 per cent of the population were for it ... the challenge is to get Parliament to feel the same way," he says.