Following One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson’s address to the National Press Club this week, what role do health organisations and health professionals have in countering the misinformation and harmful statements that were then broadcast and reported widely around the country?
Dr Supriya Subramani, a Lecturer in Ethics and Critical Theory at Sydney Health Ethics, School of Public Health, University of Sydney, explores some of the public health concerns at stake below. This is the first article in a Croakey series investigating these issues.
Supriya Subramani writes:
Health and medical organisations absolutely have a responsibility and accountability to respond when populist politicians circulate disinformation, racism, anti-Indigenous sentiment, anti-immigrant narratives, climate denial, transphobia, or attacks on public institutions.
If we agree that political rhetoric shapes the conditions in which people live, work, access care, and understand one another, then these are clearly public health matters. Organisations therefore have a critical role to play.
One of the challenges, as I see it, is that public health organisations, including universities, often continue to imagine themselves as “neutral.” They act as though neutrality is achieved simply through appeals to scientific evidence, and as though public health only becomes “properly political” when it is tied to disease, illness, or measurable harm. But this idea of neutrality itself needs to be questioned.
As we know, silence in moments of anti-Indigenous hostility, racialised scapegoating of immigrants, climate denial, or attacks on migrant communities is not neutral. It gives up ground in the democratic space. This is where organisations and intellectuals need more courage. Some do speak out, but we need many more.
Some scientists and health researchers still understand their work as “apolitical,” except perhaps those who already see themselves as politically engaged public scholars. But history shows us that claiming to be apolitical is often one way power protects itself. Meanwhile, public life becomes shaped by fear, resentment, and the production of “disposable others.”
Wider institutional failure
I think the growing support for One Nation should be read not only as a rise in right-wing populism, but also as a symptom of wider institutional failure.
It tells us something about the spaces that mainstream political institutions, including Labor, have vacated or failed to inhabit meaningfully: spaces of trust, relational accountability, political education, and public engagement. One Nation is capitalising on these gaps, and on institutional silence.
Where there is abandonment, resentment grows, and where there is silence, reactionary politics finds oxygen!
One of the dangers of populist rhetoric is that it turns structural problems into supposed moral failures of already marginalised communities. When Hanson invokes “the people of Australia,” she presents an apparently inclusive public.
But, as James Baldwin reminds us, “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” The language of inclusion cannot be separated from who is actually being targeted.
When Hanson speaks of “Australians,” we need to ask who is being imagined. It is often a racialised figure: implicitly white, non-Indigenous, culturally assimilated, and positioned as under threat.
Others are included only conditionally, as long as we are grateful, productive, and willing to conform. This is how white nationalism present itself through the language of common sense, unity, and democracy. And calls to reject “division” often end up preserving the deep racial and colonial divisions on which the nation is built.
From a public health perspective, this matters. Such rhetoric shapes whose suffering is recognised.
From my own work on disrespect, othering, and belonging in health, I would say this kind of speech has not only health and wellbeing effects, but also clear material consequences.
Public health response
A public health response needs to name both the falsehood and the harm it produces. These issues are tied to broader political and economic choices, housing inequality, poverty, access to healthcare, racial exclusion, climate inaction, that feed distrust and tension. Then, of course, organisations and institutions have a role in educating, building critical awareness, and creating spaces of trust.
We already have strong models of courage and accountability. First Nations communities have long demanded justice across areas such as deaths in custody, child removal, land, health, and public institutions. Refugee communities continue to expose the violence of borders, detention, and exclusion.
These struggles remind us that public health is not just about services or risk factors. It is about the conditions under which people can live, speak, resist, grieve, and belong.
We saw similar dynamics in recent student protests and encampments. Rather than engaging students as political actors raising urgent ethical questions, many institutions and some academics responded with censorship, policing, and reputational management. This shows how quickly institutions that speak the language of equity, diversity and justice can retreat when those commitments become inconvenient.
There are many examples of this selective response. One clear case is the public outrage over the Bankstown Hospital nurses’ antisemitic video. The outrage was necessary: hate speech in healthcare fundamentally undermines trust and the duty to care.
But the response also reveals a broader pattern. As I argued in my article for ABC Religion & Ethics, the incident was treated as an exceptional moral failure, while wider evidence of systemic racism in Australian healthcare often receives far less urgent attention.
I have also raised this in a letter to the editor of The Medical Journal of Australia, highlighting the need for more consistent accountability within healthcare and academia.
If Australia wants to avoid sliding further into right-wing authoritarian and populist politics, organisations, universities, health bodies, media institutions, and individuals need to become more politically aware in their everyday practices.
We need to reject the idea that public health can somehow be separated from racism, colonialism, borders, climate, gender, media, housing, incarceration, and the distribution of dignity.
The task is not only to correct misinformation after the fact. We also need to ask what institutional conditions have made that misinformation persuasive in the first place.
I would say, if we take public health’s values seriously, we need to speak before “crises” become more challenging. And we need to learn from First Nations resistance, refugee-led advocacy, student movements, and communities who have never had the option of being “neutral.”
At the same time, many organisations stay quiet or even suppress these movements, often out of fear of losing funding or political access. But history, including more recent examples such as the Trump Administration, shows what happens when disinformation, anti-science rhetoric, and attacks on public institutions become normalised.
Defend democratic conditions
COVID-19 made this very clear, when trust breaks down and expertise is framed as elitism, public health becomes much harder to sustain. So the task is not just to defend science, but to defend the democratic conditions that make public health possible.
As I see, the proposed cuts to SBS and the ABC may also have significant public health implications. Public broadcasters are part of the public health ecosystem! They provide emergency information, multilingual communication, scrutiny of policy, and platforms for diverse voices.
For migrant and refugee communities in particular, SBS plays a crucial role in access and recognition. Weakening these institutions would deepen information inequality and further marginalise already minoritised communities.
The media also has an important role, and it should not treat figures like Pauline Hanson as spectacle or entertainment, or rely on outrage cycles that ultimately amplify these dynamics.
We need to question why certain voices are repeatedly given national platforms, while those affected are expected to respond calmly and “rationally.” There is a clear asymmetry here, some are granted anger, while others are expected to remain composed.
For me, this ultimately comes back to belonging. Public health is not just about services or risk factors. It is about whether people can live in a society without being humiliated, scapegoated, or treated as conditional members.
When political speech attacks First Nations self-determination, climate action, public media, and minority communities, it is also attacking the conditions of health itself.
So yes, intellectuals, health and medical organisations should speak more, and we should speak to defend the possibility of a society where everyone’s health, dignity, and belonging matter.
Author details
Dr Supriya Subramani is a Lecturer in Ethics and Critical Theory at Sydney Health Ethics, School of Public Health, University of Sydney. She employs critical philosophical ethnography and phenomenological methods, taking an interdisciplinary approach, to study moral emotions such as humiliation and moral concepts including respect, othering, and belonging. Her work around resisting structural, epistemic and embodied injustice is deeply informed by liberation philosophy, anti-caste thought, and anti-racist philosophy. Currently, her projects focus on migrant health, chronic pain, and epistemological and methodological questions concerning the relationship between emotions, the self, the other, and knowledge production. She has published across health humanities and bioethics spaces and is active in public engagement through diverse media platforms such as ABC and SBS, as well as academic platforms. Her first book, Passive Patient Culture in India: Disrespect in Law and Medicine, has received wide recognition from scholars across diverse disciplines. For more details, visit: www.supriyasubramani.com
Also read: Health leaders respond to Pauline Hanson and the rise of populism
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