The Australian regulator of health practitioners has been hijacked by a lobby group agitating on behalf of a foreign country adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism. Andrew Brown reports.
Two years ago, Australia’s medical regulator put its position in writing. It had not adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. It said so plainly.
On 5 March 2024, Kym Ayscough, the Executive Director of Regulatory Operations at Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA – a government agency), wrote to the Medical Association for Prevention of War. Reports were circulating that AHPRA had adopted the IHRA definition.
Ayscough was unambiguous. The agency had made no such commitment.
On 17 June 2026, it did.
And it did so not through a regulatory process, not through consultation with the professions it governs, but through a joint statement issued alongside Jillian Segal, the federal government’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism.
Sit with what that means. Segal occupies an office that did not exist until a Prime Minister created it. She stood for no election. She passed no confirmation. She holds no place on any medical board and answers to no professional body. She was appointed by one man, and she reports to him.
Yet, on 17 June, Segal’s handbook became a reference standard for the regulator that controls
whether a million Australians keep the right to work.
AHPRA overreach
Trace the line plainly. One politician created the office. One person fills it. That person’s document now guides how a statutory regulator reads the conduct of every doctor, nurse and pharmacist in the country. No parliament voted for it. No profession was asked.
The reach runs from a single appointment straight into the registration file of a paramedic in Townsville and a midwife in Perth, and not one of them was consulted along the way.
That is the part AHPRA cannot explain away.
A regulator that is meant to be fiercely independent did not reach this position through its own process. It announced it is standing beside a political appointee, adopting a political appointee’s handbook, on one of the most contested political questions on earth. The independence that gives a regulator its authority was handed across in a joint media release.
Nearly one million registered health practitioners woke up to a new political reality. They were not asked. They were not consulted.
Most did not know it had happened.
When Healthed – an education provider for general practitioners across the country – surveyed more than a thousand GPs on 23 June, 61% had no idea AHPRA had done it. Just 150 doctors knew. The rest were already living under a regulatory standard they had never heard of.
So what changed between March 2024 and June 2026? AHPRA has not said. It reversed a written position on one of the most contested definitions in public life and offered no account of who made the decision, what evidence was weighed, what legal advice was taken, or why the professions were bypassed.
The silence tells the story
AHPRA regulates doctors, nurses, midwives, dentists, psychologists, pharmacists, physiotherapists, paramedics and allied health workers. For these people, registration is not paperwork. It is the right to work. Years of study, debt and family security sit behind it.
The agency already holds the powers to deal with racism, discrimination, harassment and misconduct. Its codes of conduct require care to be free from discrimination. Its social media guidance already states that professional obligations apply to posts on Instagram or X.
Its published guidance confirms that conduct that poses no risk to public safety or public confidence is unlikely to warrant investigation.
So the question the regulator has refused to answer is the obvious one.
What gap was this designed to fill?
AHPRA’s own numbers make the absence of a problem clearer still. Between October 2023 and February 2024, it received 63 notifications about social media posts on the Gaza conflict, involving 43 practitioners. Of those, 38 alleged antisemitism or similar conduct and 25 alleged Islamophobia. More than 70% were closed. Two practitioners faced potential disciplinary action. The existing system worked.
It sorted serious complaints from political noise.
No serious person argues antisemitism should be tolerated in healthcare. Jewish doctors, nurses, patients and students have the same right as anyone to work and receive care without hatred. That is not in dispute.
What is in dispute is whether a medical regulator should adopt a definition that travels well beyond ordinary discrimination and into Israel, Gaza, Zionism, occupation and political speech.
Kenneth Stern, the man who drafted the IHRA definition, has spent years warning it is being weaponised to silence speech. He wrote it to help agencies collect data, not to discipline clinicians.
The UK example
Now look to Britain. Just last week, the British Medical Association (BMA), the union representing more than 200,000 doctors and medical students, voted to reject the IHRA definition. It went further. It called on the government and NHS England to revoke the definition’s mandatory adoption across the health service until safeguards for free speech are in place.
It also warned the definition has a chilling effect that stops doctors expressing ethical concern about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. The body that exists to defend British doctors looked at this definition and moved to throw it out.
Read that contrast slowly. In Britain, the doctors’ own body rejected it. In Australia, the body with power over a practitioner’s registration embraced it. One protects doctors and refused the definition. The other regulates them and adopted it without asking.
If the BMA, with no power to deregister anyone, judged the IHRA definition too dangerous for free speech in healthcare, why has a regulator that can end a career judged it safe?
The lawfare effect
The pushback has been immediate and broad. By late June, close to 2,000 practitioners from across Australia had signed an open letter warning that the definition could target practitioners for lawful advocacy. More than 60 health organisations have endorsed concerns.
In addition, the Australian Islamic Medical Association, the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, the NSW Council for Civil Liberties and Liberty Victoria have all objected. So have Jewish organisations that reject the IHRA definition as harmful to the fight against antisemitism.
When prominent Jewish voices oppose a measure taken in their name, the claim of consultation collapses on its own terms.
The danger is not only deregistration at the end of a process. The process is the punishment. A complaint can be anonymous. It can be politically motivated. Yet once lodged, a practitioner faces months of correspondence, legal costs, stress and reputational harm. Employers grow nervous. Patients Google a name and see an allegation before any finding is made. Even when cleared, the stain remains. That is how lawfare works. It does not need to win.
It needs only to exhaust and to frighten.
Consider Dr Muhammad Mustafa, one of Australia’s most prominent medical voices on Gaza. Whether you agree with every word is beside the point. The point is whether a doctor should fear professional ruin for stating a public view about civilian deaths or attacks on hospitals.
If a doctor says Israel is committing war crimes, is that political speech or misconduct? If a nurse condemns the bombing of hospitals in Gaza, is that advocacy or antisemitism? These questions now hang over a million regulated Australians.
AHPRA says it is reviewing its Vexatious Notifications Framework and building an advisory panel. Good. But you do not bolt safeguards onto a weapon while you are still handing it out.
The honest move is to put the weapon down first.
The regulator’s job is to ensure patient safety and uphold clinical standards. It is not the Department of Foreign Affairs. It is not a tribunal of Middle Eastern history. And it is not an arm of a political envoy appointed by one Prime Minister.
It denied this decision in writing in 2024. It made it in secret in 2026. It made it beside a political appointee, using that appointee’s handbook, without asking a single profession it governs.
Every step of that sequence is on the record, and every step demands an answer. Who decided this? Who was consulted? What evidence was weighed? What legal advice was taken?
Why did a regulator surrender its independence in a joint statement with a politician’s envoy?
Until AHPRA answers, a million Australians are entitled to ask the question it has worked hardest to avoid.
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