We’re right to be outraged about the Sydney nurses – but let’s be careful about why

There have been two significant, symbolic developments this past week in what we might call the Bankstown nurses story. The first is that NSW police identified which criminal charges are likely ultimately to be brought against the two nurses in question: using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence. The second is that we learned the male nurse has been admitted to hospital, whisked there by emergency services “following reports of a concern for welfare”. There, we should hope, he will receive the kind of treatment his comments suggest he might deny others: the best possible care, irrespective of who he is or what he has done.

I do not say that facetiously, or with barbs. I say it because it’s the entire point. If charges are ultimately laid, he will find himself in the fold of the two institutions that give him inalienable rights: medicine and the law. Two disciplines which, however frequently their practitioners may fall short, are predicated on the inherent human dignity of those laid before them. It is not only worthy human beings who are entitled to medical treatment or a fair trial. It is the human being as such. Worthy by mere existence.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

It simply must be that way because both are characterised by enormous vulnerability. The defendant accused of a crime places his or her liberty in the gift of the state. The patient experiences the closest thing we have to pure defencelessness, even lying unconscious before someone with the tools and ability to take your life. It is the fragility of these situations, the near total trust they require, that makes any suggestion of their abuse so viscerally intolerable.

That, I suspect, is what’s behind the inchoate outrage this story has unleashed. It cannot be explained by the mere fact of hate speech, for we’ve seen that before. It cannot be simply people’s fear that they might genuinely suffer such mistreatment, for the shock and anger has spread far beyond Israelis and Jews, as though something in common is at stake. It is the specific setting of healthcare that made this singular, carrying a sense there has been a violation of something sacred.

Let’s follow this instinct, because if we are going to be outraged it is important to know why; to be outraged for the right reason, and therefore to be guided by it in our response. Outrage, when misdirected, veers off into brutality. Outrage properly directed, reinforces to us the things that are most precious, that are to be cherished and preserved.

There is, for instance, one strand of commentary that wants to render this as a crisis of migration, noting especially the male nurse’s refugee status. This invokes familiar themes of foreigners with suspect or alien values undermining our otherwise cohesive society, or disturbing the peace by bringing their conflicts with them to Australia. This is a shaky argument at the best of times, but it is an especially poor one at a time when the papers are carrying stories about neo-Nazi exercise groups on our beaches. Or when two young Muslim women, identifiable by their hijabs, one of whom was pregnant, have just been allegedly assaulted to the point of hospitalisation in unprovoked attacks that seem to have nothing to do with migration.

Nurses Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh with Israeli social media personality Max Veifer.Credit: @maxveifer on Instagram.

The problem here is not ultimately one of importing a conflict into Australia. It is a problem of importing a conflict – any conflict – into healthcare. To see just how profound a violation that is, consider that it would be unacceptable even in a literal war zone. A military doctor is obliged to give medical treatment to enemy combatants at the same standard as to one’s own side. That leads to the remarkable situation where our own soldiers might try to kill an adversary, only to have our doctors work to save his life. This is not theoretical. Australian soldiers in Afghanistan treated Taliban fighters.

That’s not absurd. It’s telling us something hugely profound about the very nature of medicine. Healthcare is not moved by the patient’s virtues or vices. An organised crime kingpin, responsible for countless deaths, who is shot in a skirmish on the street and rushed to hospital, gets treatment with no questions asked. He is, at that point, not a crime boss. He is a soul. And he can never lose that status.

Of course, Jews have every right to feel particularly aggrieved in this case. But the scandal here is not truly about the identity of either the nurses or their patients. It would be the same violation if the nurses were white or Indigenous or Jewish. The same if the patients were Muslim or Irish. It’s also why the taint does not go away if the nurses’ comments were, as seems likely, never turned into action; if they were rhetorical bluster or, as one nurse explained, “a joke” for which he has publicly apologised. The problem isn’t one of mere speech or offence because at issue is the sacred trust between nurse and patient. Medicine only works when it lives in a place, not just beyond prejudice, but beyond any politics of this sort. That is the thing to be cherished, the thing to be preserved.

Given that, it is crass – and perhaps its own sort of violation – to conscript this moment into a culture war. Those migration-focused analyses go seriously astray, not just because they are an affront to the extraordinary contributions of so many doctors and nurses in our country, and not just because they generalise from a case that seems to have no precedent in our health system. They go astray because they look at this episode and see a chance to refurbish an old argument. To do that is not to protect the carer-patient relationship. It is not to honour the sacredness of that trust. It is instead to reduce it to a political plaything.

Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.

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