Andrew Denton, an Australian TV star who has become the country’s most prominent campaigner for voluntary euthanasia, will arrive in New Zealand this week for a five-day speaking tour.

Denton, 55, turned his attention to the cause after watching his novelist father Kit suffer a painful and protracted death in hospital from heart disease. “It was horrible to watch and horrible to hear,” he said. “The pain relief they gave him wasn’t enough.”

After retiring from his award-winning TV career, Denton spent a year talking with people on both sides of the voluntary euthanasia debate and visited the Netherlands, Belgium and the US state of Oregon where assisted dying is legal and practised.

He put his interviews into a moving 17-part podcast called Better Off Dead which made a huge impact in Australia, where the issue created new headlines last week.

In Victoria, a committee of the state parliament recommended a law change allowing doctors to help terminally ill patients with unbearable suffering to end their lives.

In South Australia, the Premier, Jay Weatherill urged state MPs to pass laws giving people a genuine choice about the end of life. “I can see little point in forcing extremely ill people to needlessly endure pain that is clearly not going to stop until it consumes them completely,” Weatherill said.

Denton, who arrives on Friday, will speak at a public session of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society of New Zealand’s annual general meeting in Wellington on Sunday (1.30pm at Brentwood Hotel, Kilbirnie). He will address public meetings in Christchurch Monday June 20 and Napier on Wednesday June 22.