The Cruelty of Reverse Racism in Healthcare, By Ian Brighthope

Australia's health system has long boasted of being among the finest in the world, but such claims dissolve under the slightest scrutiny. Behind the glossy reports and government rhetoric lies a reality of crisis wards, neglected patients, and exhausted staff. Today, this collapse is compounded by a new and deeply divisive policy: the prioritisation of Indigenous patients for medical care above all others, irrespective of need.

On the surface, the policy is framed as an act of equity—an attempt to "close the gap" by ensuring Indigenous Australians have faster access to services. In practice, however, it represents a dangerous form of reverse racism. At a time when acutely ill patients are lying untreated in hospital corridors, when general practitioners are overwhelmed and many Australians cannot even secure a routine consultation, diverting doctors and nurses to treat less urgent cases solely on the basis of race is unconscionable.

The Betrayal of the Sickest

Consider the plight of patients suffering with long COVID—a condition that leaves thousands debilitated, exhausted, and often unable to work. Add to this the growing cohort of severely injured Australians who live with chronic complications from COVID vaccination. Many of these individuals are so ill that their daily lives are reduced to survival, yet they are consistently denied timely specialist appointments, appropriate investigations, and even basic medical acknowledgement. I am in constant contact with these patients from all over the country, many dying unnecessarily from the turbo cancers. They remain in limbo, with some waiting months or years just to see a doctor.

Now imagine these very same patients watching as hospital staff are ordered to walk past them in order to attend to others with lesser symptoms, simply because of their ancestry. In effect, the hospital is sanctioning the abandonment of the sickest in our community in the name of 'ideology.' This is not justice. It is cruelty disguised as compassion.

A System Already in Ruin

From a bigger picture, the Australian health system is collapsing under the weight of chronic under-funding, bureaucratic mismanagement, and political hubris. The claim that it is "one of the best in the world" is, at best, a self-delusion. Emergency departments resemble holding pens more than places of healing, with patients left on trolleys in corridors for hours, sometimes days. General practitioners are drowning under administrative burdens, while bulk-billing—the linchpin of universal care—has all but collapsed in many communities.

To then impose race-based triage into this dismal system is to add fuel to the fire. Medical staff, already torn between too many patients and too few resources, are forced into impossible ethical dilemmas: abandon the acutely ill in order to comply with racial preference orders. No profession should be placed in such a position, and no patient should be treated as expendable because their ethnicity fails to align with the prevailing 'political agenda.'

The False Virtue of the Extreme Left

The extreme left in both state and federal governments champions similar policies as moral victories, but in truth they are acts of waste and division. Billions are poured into bureaucratic programs, "cultural safety" seminars, and endless committees, while ordinary Australians—Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike—cannot afford the very basics of health. Food insecurity grows, malnutrition marches silently into lower-income households, and even those with jobs are forced to choose between paying rent and eating a healthy diet. Entering a home of these unfortunate people, many who really deserve to be granted NDIS status but denied, and you can smell the poverty, the vermin and the vomit.

Equity is not achieved by elevating one group above another. True justice requires that every patient be treated on the basis of clinical need, not 'political or medical ideology.' The cancer patient gasping for breath, the long COVID sufferer unable to climb a single flight of stairs, the vaccine-injured mother bedridden with paralysis and ignored—these individuals must not be told that their suffering is secondary to any racial narrative.

A Call for Reality and Reform

Racism in any form is destructive, whether it flows from entrenched discrimination of the past or from the misguided virtue-signalling of today. Health care must remain impartial, grounded in the timeless principle of medicine: treat the sickest first. Australia's current path abandons that principle and the … hospital unethical ruling, in doing so, abandons the moral core of medicine itself.

The dismal truth is that our health system is failing everyone. It is not a beacon of excellence but a fragile, decaying structure propped up by political slogans. Until governments cease squandering resources on divisive policies and instead restore fairness, integrity, and clinical sense to the allocation of care, Australians of all backgrounds will continue to suffer.

The future of our nation's health cannot be built on the quicksand of reverse racism. It must be built on need, on compassion, and on the understanding that every Australian life is of equal value, regardless of heritage. Anything less is not progress. It is FAILURE.

https://ianbrighthope.substack.com/p/the-cruelty-of-reverse-racism-in