AusDoc, the worst-ever health minister and a Sky News investigation
“The worst lie — you know, is how they keep saying Peter Dutton is the worst health minister ever and he was voted the worst health minister.
“I was intrigued. Who was doing this voting? So, I looked it up.”
This is veteran broadcaster Steve Price on Sky News on Monday night talking about his attempt at investigative journalism.
With the election looming, he has been annoyed by the constant and widespread regurgitation of an AusDoc poll which asked our readers who, in their view, was the worst health minister in Medicare history.
He was angry and he wanted to get to the truth.
For context, we ran the poll over a period of about 24 hours, a few weeks after Mr Dutton was moved to the Department of Immigration and Border Protection following his disastrous flirtation with GP co-payments.
Evidently, the poll did not go Mr Dutton’s way but a decade on it has now become weaponised as the favoured meme of the current government which has been posting numerous videos about the results through TikTok and Instagram and other social media.
Mr Price, a well-known broadcaster with a 30-year history in journalism according to his Wikipedia page, continued as follows:
“It’s [from] something called Doctors’ Magazine,” he says inaccurately.
“And it’s got 1100 readers only, and this is back in 2013, The Guardian reported.
“And one doctor, one, said that Peter Dutton was gullible and the worst health minister in history.
“That’s it. So, they’ve gone back and rewritten history.
“And they keep saying, ‘Oh, Peter Dutton has been voted the worst health minister in history. The worst? This one doctor has said he was pleased he’d been demoted from health minister.”
The Sky News host Sharri Markson responds: “It’s all just fiction!”
There is now a video on the Sky News website with the title: ‘Rewritten history: Peter Dutton’s history as health minister scrutinised by ‘one’ doctor’.
We are not sure who is exactly rewriting history here and we are not sure where Mr Price sourced his information. But surely even ChatGPT does not experience that many hallucinations?
So take a deep breath, and just for the record, we’ll go through them.
Firstly, the publication is called Australian Doctor not Doctors’ Magazine.
Our online readership now is around 33,000 doctors a month, but at the time of the poll it was 20,000, mainly GPs.
The poll (and there definitely was a poll, it was no fiction) was run in 2015, not as Mr Price says 2013.
The 1100 number he refers to was not the AusDoc readership but actually the number of doctors (1077 to be precise) who voted in the poll he suggests didn’t take place.
Given the results of the poll (see the box below) are now being circulated for party political purposes and to be fair to Peter Dutton, it is important to stress the following.
The results were never going to end up in a Cochrane review and we never presented it as such.
As most of us know, it is methodologically tricky to do randomised controlled trials when it comes to Federal health ministers and their risks and benefits.
As a web poll, it was obviously subject to selection bias.
But there was also recency bias.
At the time we ran it, Mr Dutton, whose time as health minister we have roundly criticised (read our 2015 analysis here: Exit Peter Dutton), had been health minister for little over a year.
But the list of his predecessors went back 30 years to the days of Neal Blewett, who became health minister in 1983. It’s probably good to assume that some doctors who responded had only a dim memory of his achievements.
The other issue in terms of who is the ‘worst’ health minister, is that Mr Dutton had successors and they were not included in the poll for reasons to do with the space-time continuum. Those ministers include Sussan Ley and Greg Hunt.
And there is also the current incumbent, Mark Butler, who seems keener than most to repeat the 2015 poll results despite (or perhaps because of) their use-by date.
What about the unnamed person referred to by Mr Price who apparently said Mr Dutton was “gullible and the worst health minister in history?”
That was Dr Donald Rose, a GP in Tasmania.
And he didn’t actually say Mr Dutton was the worst health minister. This is what he said: “Dutton will be remembered as the dullest, least innovative and most gullible for swallowing the reforms from his think tank.
“Although I am glad he has been demoted, it would have been good if he was still around to take responsibility for the current chaos he has caused.”
Maybe he has changed his view now. Mr Price should find out.
The question we asked back in 2015: Who has been the worst federal health minister in recent memory? (n=1077)
| Federal minister | Party | Vote (%) |
| Peter Dutton | LNP | 46 |
| Tanya Plibersek | ALP | 8 |
| Nicola Roxon | ALP | 17 |
| Tony Abbott | LNP | 13 |
| Kay Patterson | LNP | 1 |
| Dr Michael Wooldridge | LNP | 7 |
| Carmen Lawrence | ALP | 2 |
| Graham Richardson | ALP | 1 |
| Brian Howe | ALP | 1 |
| Neal Blewett | ALP | 4 |
