Unchecked power of AHPRA and the state - The Spectator Australia

12/08/2025

What we are witnessing is the transformation of health regulation into an instrument of political enforcement. You no longer need to harm a patient to be punished. You only need to express a belief that challenges the prevailing politically correct orthodoxy. That’s enough to lose your career, your medical registration, and your reputation. Unapproved ideas, make you a danger to patients and a threat to confidence in public health.

This is not conjecture. I speak from personal experience. Pushing back against this ideological creep costs and it can cost a lot. In the short term it may cost your career, your financial wellbeing, your relationships, and your reputation. However, self-censoring into medical and cultural tyranny which is where we appear headed will cost you and your children their freedom of thought, speech, choice and the right to seek truth. You will pay either way.

I Was Investigated for Expressing an Opinion

There was no patient complaint. No adverse outcome. There was however a challenge to government guidelines using evidence.

But because a public health academic took issue with opinion articles I had written, in my capacity as Secretary of the Australian Medical Professionals Society, I was formally referred to the regulator AHPRA, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency via the Office of the Health Ombudsman OHO.

The articles that apparently made me a threat to the public through undermining confidence in government, raised evidence-based concerns about pandemic policy, the erosion of informed consent, and the increasing influence of ideological frameworks in health governance. These were legitimate issues raised by members, backed by science, and published in the public interest.

Yet that was enough. I was investigated not for how I practise, but for what I think. And in that, I am far from alone.

Dr Jereth Kok: Found Guilty of Inappropriate Belief, Not Inappropriate Practice

In July 2025, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) ruled that Melbourne GP Dr Jereth Kok was unfit to practise medicine. Not because he harmed anyone, or acted unprofessionally, but because of views he expressed online, years earlier, in a personal capacity.

VCAT acknowledged that his clinical work was competent. There were no patient complaints. But the tribunal found his private expressions of Christian belief made him unfit to practice medicine, and potentially damaging to the public’s confidence in the profession. He was suspended under AHPRA’s immediate action powers for six years because of his politically incorrect Christian views, and was forced to retrain in IT to provide for his children.

Under changes to the National Law, that is now enough. Undermining public confidence is no longer a vague concern, it is the guiding legal principle for regulatory action. Even if your statements are factual, even if your intent is ethical, you may be deemed a threat to government guidelines and stripped of your ability to practise.

The fact that the medical regulator used registration fees to hire a forensic investigator to trawl through a doctor’s personal social media accounts should make it clear that we no longer live in a free, democratic society where the public can be sure that debate about topics such as abortion, gender ideology, or the scientific evidence around the pandemic can take place without consequence. We are paying for our own persecution and the destruction of science.

Governments and regulators now treat ‘maintaining public confidence’ as enforcing belief, persuading people that something is right and good even when it is not. This should concern every professional in the country. It has included making the public believe that masks work, that ‘six feet apart’ is evidence-based, that the food pyramid is good for you, that stopping puberty and cutting off healthy organs saves lives and that lockdowns were grounded in science, despite evidence to the contrary.

Control Without Evidence, Sanction Without Harm

Dr Kok’s case is not isolated. It’s part of a pattern.

Dr Jillian Spencer, a senior child psychiatrist, was suspended from her public hospital role at Queensland Children’s Hospital after raising clinical concerns about gender-affirming treatment in children. Her suspension wasn’t due to patient harm or clinical misconduct, but because she challenged politically sensitive treatment guidelines within the system.

She remains under investigation by AHPRA. Though technically still registered, she has been effectively removed from her workplace for speaking up for patient/child safety in line with what many countries internationally now enforce. Concerns clearly outlined in letters sent by AMPS and NPAA the Nurses Professional Association of Australia.

These are but three examples of many I could document. The message is clear to practitioners in Australia: if you voice views that are out of step with the dominant narrative, your occupation is not secure, no matter how competent you are.

Nearly One Million Practitioners Are Under Regulatory Control

AHPRA oversees the registration of almost 1 million health practitioners, spanning medicine, nursing, psychology, midwifery, physiotherapy, and more. These professionals include those working in both public and private practice, yet the scope of AHPRA’s influence is near total.

Even those who operate entirely outside the government system are subject to its ideological reach. Your employer may be private, but your registration is public and that means your speech, your conduct, even your personal online views must align with government-sanctioned ideas.

This creates a profound chilling effect. Professionals who disagree with state-sanctioned narratives are now faced with an impossible choice: speak honestly and risk their livelihood, or stay silent and watch medical ethics and science erode.

More Than Half the Country Is Reliant on the State

This control is compounded by another reality: over 50 per cent of Australians now depend on the government for income.

When combined with the nearly one million health professionals whose livelihoods hinge on AHPRA’s discretion, this represents a majority of the adult population functionally under government regulatory financial control.

In such a landscape, freedom of expression is not merely at risk, it is structurally suppressed. If your ability to feed your family depends on government approval, speaking out becomes a dangerous act. 1984 are we there yet?

AHPRA: Regulator or Ideological Enforcer?

AHPRA’s public alignment with Rainbow Health Australia, its pursuit of Rainbow Tick accreditation, and its endorsement of identity-based ideological frameworks through their ‘Acknowledgement of Country’, signal a shift away from any perceptions of regulatory neutrality.

Respectful, inclusive care is essential in healthcare. But mandating ideological allegiance, punishing dissent, prescribing language, or embedding political Litmus tests into codes of conduct, goes far beyond clinical safety. It creates a profession where belief is policed more strictly than clinical competence.

And it leads to absurd contradictions: doctors who question policy are investigated, suspended and sometimes deregistered as a serious risk to public health, while others found guilty of actual clinical misconduct, domestic violence or breaching patient boundaries including sexual assault, retain their right to practise. Complaints to AHPRA about clearly false statements made in Covid-related press conferences by public health officials during the pandemic were acknowledged as false, yet no action was taken and no corrections issued. It seems that, for the regulator, ideology trumps truth.

Covid Mandates Normalised Regulatory Overreach

The pandemic did not create these problems, but it accelerated them. In March 2021, AHPRA and the National Boards issued a joint position statement warning practitioners that publicly contradicting official Covid health advice could result in regulatory action.

That one directive had an immediate and silencing effect. Doctors who raised concerns about vaccine risk profiles, early treatments, or mandates were reported, investigated, and in many cases immediately suspended as a threat to public health, not for clinical harm, but for ‘undermining public confidence’, for questioning public health messaging, with most of their ‘controversial’ opinions being proved right with time.

Truth no longer mattered. Scientific uncertainty was reframed as professional misconduct. And informed consent was replaced by coerced consensus through compliance with government guidelines and mandates.

We Are Regulating Ourselves Into Silence

The public has the right to expect that their healthcare system is grounded in ethics, evidence, and transparency, not censorship and fear.

But right now, health professionals are allowing themselves to be regulated into silence. Not because they lack concern, but because they lack protection and perhaps the fortitude to stand. Speaking out, even respectfully, even in defence of patients, has become a huge risk.

That is not how public confidence is earned. That is how it is destroyed.

The Power of a Principled Minority

History shows that it only takes a small, active minority to change the course of a system. The 3.5 per cent rule, supported by empirical studies on social movements, demonstrates that when just 3.5 per cent of the population engages in sustained, non-violent resistance, meaningful change becomes inevitable.

We don’t need everyone to speak, but with more than half the population now dependent on the government for their livelihood, we have seen the power it wields, especially during the Covid years. What we do need is enough of us to stop whispering and self-censoring. To act. To write. To challenge. And to stand beside those who have already paid the price for doing so.

If we fail, we will not only lose professional autonomy, we will lose the moral, ethical foundation of the health professions themselves. Our freedoms are already tightly controlled to maintain confidence in government. The question is: are there 3.5 per cent in Australia that have the conviction, character, and courage to pay a price to stand for truth and freedom to halt our descent into total servitude?

Kara Thomas is the Secretary of the Australian Medical Professionals Society and President of the Nurses Professional Association of Australia

Dr Andrew McIntyre Consultant Gastroenterologist on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast