I was invited to speak at ‘The Misdeeds of AHPRA’ conference held in Sydney on Saturday, 3 May 2025. As it was election day, I couldn’t attend in person and was asked to pre-record a video, which I happily did.
My brief video exposes the many serious conflicts of interest among Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency (AHPRA) board members. The conference organisers used it to open the day.
AHPRA faced heavy criticism during the COVID period. Established in 2010, AHPRA was meant to be an independent body overseeing medical practitioners. Yet its board members are deeply intertwined with government and academia, raising questions about its independence.
Recent surveys by the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS) reveal that over 82% of healthcare professionals believe AHPRA lacks fairness and transparency. Investigations drag on for years, causing significant mental and financial strain on practitioners.
AHPRA’s actions during the COVID period, including prosecuting medical professionals for speaking out truthfully to their patients and the public, have eroded public trust and severely crippled our healthcare service.
It’s time for a thorough review and reform to restore confidence in our healthcare system.
Transcript
Hello, I’m Senator Malcolm Roberts, Senator for Queensland with One Nation.
Thank you for the work you’re doing at this conference.
AHPRA (Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency) was heavily criticised during the COVID period. And deservedly so. For those at home, I’ll give a quick background to AHPRA.
The national scheme for registration and regulation of medical practitioners that the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency (AHPRA) administers, was implemented in 2010 under the Rudd-Gillard-Labour Government. The so called national law is not a Commonwealth law. Instead it is implemented by each state passing the same legislation, with Queensland acting as the host jurisdiction.
Any proposed amendment to the national law must be approved by the Council of Health Ministers, then passed by the Queensland Parliament, then other states. In 2010 the Federal Government legislated to recognise medical professionals licenced by AHPRA to prescribe under Medicare and the PBS.
AHPRA replaced state based powers with a national independent system of registration and standards for practitioners. AHPRA now hosts fifteen boards, each regulating one area of the medical profession.
AHPRA act as the independent administrator and the boards are the policy makers in their own area. Except that AHPRA is not independent.
AHPRA Chair – Miss Gill Callister – doubles as the Chief Executive Officer of Mind Australia, a commercial operation which provides mental health services, including under the bloated NDIS.
Mind Australia receives additional funding directly from state and federal governments. Board member – Miss Barbara Yo – doubles as Chief of Monash Health, a Victorian government department. In other words, a public servant.
Ari Freiberg is an Emeritus Professor of Law at Monash University, which receives half a billion dollars a year from the federal government. Linton Morris is on the board of Alfred Health, another public servant, as is Geoffrey Moffat, who’s on the board of WA Country Health. And so it goes on and on.
Everyone of the AHPRA board is an academic funded by the government, or is a bureaucrat funded by the government.
How can these people be considered independent? They are NOT independent.
As Kara Thomas pointed out in a January Quadrant article, the recent Bay versus Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency court judgement specifically noted that while the pandemic was “an extraordinary period of history,” it did not authorise AHPRA to “abrogate the right of persons to a hearing before an apparently unbiased tribunal.”
Or extend AHPRA’s role to “include protection of government and regulatory agencies from political criticism.”
That’s exactly what AHPRA did.
The spawn of the medical establishment rushed to defend the medical establishment at a terrible cost to the public’s confidence in the medical industry.
The Australian Medical Professional Society (AMPS) recent survey of medical practitioners found 82.6% of healthcare professionals believe AHPRA lacks fairness and transparency in handling complaints and 78.5 percent report unfair treatment.
Unfair treatment!
These numbers reveal and represent AHPRA damning failure. Unfair treatment includes investigations that last for years, career destroying delays and devastating financial and mental health impacts, including suicides.
Many health professionals contemplate leaving the profession entirely.
The acceptance of anonymous complaints and the punitive nature of investigations without proper vetting has created a culture of fear where doctors have said they now practise risk averse defensive medicine, which is not medicine.
This is not incompetent – it’s deliberate. The culture of fear has been created to rob medical professionals of their will to practise medicine in the best interests of the patient.
This is the opposite of care.
Instead, AHPRA has engineered a situation where doctors practise in the best interest of the pharmaceutical industry that AHPRA works for. One example of this is the way in which AHPRA looks the other way when 1500 Australians die every year from an overdose of a medication prescribed by one of Australia’s 88,000 prescribing medical professionals.
In the last 12 months AHPRA prosecuted 31 people. Only two of these relate to prescription drugs of any kind. And yet in Senate estimates, AHPRA advised me they had prosecuted 21 medical professionals for speaking the truth about COVID.
AHPRA prosecuted one practitioner in part for their anti trans position. AHPRA is fighting a rearguard action against the overwhelming shift in public attitude away from invasive medical procedures on children.
Why? Because this will be a billion dollar industry next financial year. If you want the best pronunciation of AHPRA, try this one: cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching – the cash registers tune.
During Senate estimates, I asked AHPRA about their cultural safety strategy, which requires all registered health practitioners to acknowledge colonialism and systemic racism.
This is politics, not medicine. Wherever power has been consolidated into a single body, their power has grown.
They become a beacon for every self interested pharmaceutical company, attracting staff prepared to behave in the most egregious way in return for power and a public service salary.
A Senate review in 2022 made fourteen recommendations, including an urgent, in depth review of their processes. That review has never happened. None of the recommendations have been actioned.
Kara Thomas’s article in Quadrant contained a set of sensible recommendations, including devolving these powers back to the States. One Nation supports each of her recommendations.
In short, AHPRA is a failed, corrupting and destructive experiment and must be shut down immediately.
I’ll give the last word to Ms Callister, AHPRA’s Chair, who reposted this tweet in 2018 – “Power comes at a price. Those in the top job have made many compromises to get there”.
Clearly those compromises include absence of professionalism, care, accountability, fairness, decency, transparency, honesty and independence.
When will this Country come together for the benefit of each individual to have a choice to be treated by their own choice of Practitioner’s for the sake of their benefits toward a better health system – to be Open- balanced- & most of all Trusted in giving the best possible Treatment to each & every Australian without the clock ticking over to get a Win- Win outcome for all Australians!!!