It's Not Complicated, Part 2

The Bankstown nurses

Must I do this again?

Let’s say you’re a nurse, at work, in scrubs, and you’ve found the time to chat with a stranger online. I know medics who work in hospitals, and I’m not sure why you’d spend your time like this – in severe verbal conflict with a random dude on your computer screen – but hey, that’s what happened.

Now, having been told that you’re speaking with an Israeli – and we don’t know what provocation might have preceded this, but still – you wish upon your random interlocutor “the most disgusting death” and boast that you kill Jewish patients in the hospital that you work in.

Let me list, in descending order of intensity, the feelings that I, and I suspect the general public had, about this: sinister, gross, and seriously fucking dumb.

It frustrates me to prosecute the obvious here: that Australian nurses should not be committing to tape their desire to murder Jewish patients. Right? The footage now asks plenty of NSW police, but regardless of their findings it has now poisoned the faith of an incalculable number of Jewish Australians.

This much should be obvious.

But it wasn’t to Senator Fatima Payman. In a stuttering video, she thought the poor people who’d helped corrupt faith in the public health system had been penalised enough simply by it becoming public.

“Let me be crystal clear,” Payman said, which are often the first words spoken by someone who’s about to muddy things. “What these two nurses said was wrong. No one should be ever be denied medical care based on their race, religion or nationality. There is never an excuse for that.”

You can feel the qualifier coming, right?

“That being said, we need to address the elephant in the room,” Payman went on. “The Prime Minister has commented. Premiers have weighed in. They made a terrible comment yet are been treated as if they have committed the absolute worst crime imaginable.

“These individuals have been fired, banned from ever working as nurses again, raided by police, placed under the most intense public scrutiny and now (they are) the ones being hospitalised; they’ve apologised, they have been punished.

“What is the end goal here? What exactly are we trying achieve? Justice or just public humiliation? We never see the same level of anger and vitriol when the roles are reversed.”

That various premiers and the Prime Minister had commented might have suggested the seriousness of this, and it shouldn’t have been surprising that police wanted to investigate folks who’d boasted of murder.

That their homes and lockers were searched doesn’t seem like an act of police overreach, I’d have thought, but here was Senator Payman defending and equivocating about a video that helped corrupt something sacrosanct – the public’s faith in its own health care system.

And that’s enough. That’s enough for their sacking and their investigation. That’s enough for vast media coverage. However dumb and vain the nurses might have been, what happened was grotesque, because it alters the faith of Australians in their own health care.

And that’s it. Reckon with it.