Australia's doctors need their own 'Kory moment', AMPS says after landmark US free speech ruling

Analysis of an op-ed by Kara Thomas and Dr Andrew McIntyre, published in The Spectator Australia, 11 August 2026.

On 5 August 2026, a United States federal court did something no Australian court has yet done for a doctor: it told a government regulator that it does not own a physician's professional opinion.

The ruling: Kory v. Bonta

In Kory v. Bonta, Judge William Shubb of the US District Court enjoined California's Attorney-General and its medical boards from investigating or prosecuting doctors over the professional opinions they share with patients about Covid-19, vaccines and treatment. Dr Pierre Kory and his co-plaintiffs had spent years fighting AB 2098, the Californian law that treated departure from the government's official Covid position as professional misconduct. The court's reasoning was blunt: regulators, Judge Shubb found, may not dress up a viewpoint prosecution as a “standard of care” case.

Kara Thomas, Secretary of the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS), and Dr Andrew McIntyre, a consultant gastroenterologist on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, argue in The Spectator Australia that the ruling exposes exactly what is missing in Australia: a legal line the state is not permitted to cross when it comes to professional medical speech.

No First Amendment, no equivalent protection here

The Kory plaintiffs won because the US First Amendment protects their speech directly. Australian doctors have no such shield — only the implied freedom of political communication, which the High Court has confirmed restrains legislative power rather than granting practitioners a personal right, and which courts and tribunals have so far declined to extend to health professionals disciplined for what they say.

AHPRA's ‘confidence’ test

Thomas and McIntyre trace the mechanism back to a single word written into the National Law: confidence. Regulators act to preserve public confidence in health services, and on 9 March 2021, AHPRA and the National Boards used that power to warn that promoting ‘anti-vaccination statements’ or advice contradicting the official ‘best available scientific evidence’ could trigger regulatory action. As the authors point out, that test asks nothing about patient harm or the evidence behind a practitioner's view — only whether their speech undermined confidence in the official position. Practitioners with peer-reviewed evidence behind them, they write, were investigated and suspended for statements later quietly conceded to be correct.

From Covid to gender medicine — and now antisemitism

The authors argue the same mechanism has since been applied well beyond Covid. In paediatric gender medicine, they note AHPRA maintains a formal relationship with activist group ACON while pursuing clinicians who raise caution aligned with the Cass Review — citing psychiatrist Dr Andrew Amos, banned from publicly criticising puberty blockers for minors, and Queensland child psychiatrist Dr Jillian Spencer, stood down in 2023 over clinical concerns she raised about gender-affirming care. It took more than three years, and a Crime and Corruption Commission finding that her suspension may have been unlawful, before Dr Spencer was cleared and reinstated.

Most recently, the authors point to AHPRA's adoption in July 2026 of the contested IHRA definition of antisemitism as a ‘regulatory reference tool’ for assessing complaints — despite warnings from the definition's own lead drafter against using it in disciplinary settings, precisely because it can capture legitimate political criticism. NPAA and AMPS have lodged a formal objection.

Regulating opinion, not medicine

The authors' central argument is that this pattern amounts to regulating opinion through doctors' livelihoods, rather than regulating clinical practice. A doctor who cannot speak freely, they write, cannot properly obtain informed consent, warn a patient, dissent from a colleague, or correct an error — and a system in which error cannot be corrected is not a safe one, whatever the position statements say. They link this directly to falling public trust: confidence in both medicine and government has declined since 2021, and vaccine uptake is at its lowest level in years.

Judge Shubb's ruling, the authors are careful to note, does not excuse quackery, fraud or genuine misconduct — those remain fully subject to discipline. What it does is draw a line: the state does not get to decide which medical opinions may be spoken. Thomas and McIntyre argue Australia needs the same line drawn — either by a court prepared to give the implied freedom real substance, or by parliaments willing to amend the National Law to protect evidence-based professional speech.

Read the full op-ed, ‘Australia's doctors need their Kory moment’, by Kara Thomas and Dr Andrew McIntyre in The Spectator Australia (11 August 2026).

Kara Thomas is Secretary of the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS). Dr Andrew McIntyre is a Consultant Gastroenterologist on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.