BY NICK BAKER

An LGBTQI+ advocacy group has warned the Coalition's Religious Discrimination Bill "will make it easier for personal religious views to interfere in patient healthcare".

The proposed bill is aimed at protecting religious expression from being discriminated against, but Equality Australia claims it may end up impeding Australians "access to quality healthcare without judgement". "A health practitioner will be permitted to express polite and well-meaning, yet harmful, religious views in a consultation setting, with their discriminatory provision of health services immunised when challenged under other anti-discrimination laws," Equality Australia said in a report released Tuesday.

The group, which was born out the marriage quality campaign, used the report to catalogue several disciplinary cases since 2003 where health practitioners had pushed their religious views on patients.

It cited one 2015 case where "a devout Catholic and psychiatrist based in Western Sydney" told a Muslim woman with bipolar disorder "there was nothing wrong with her, as he prayed over her and drew the sign of a cross with holy water".

And in a 2007 case, a Christian dentist in Victoria "suggested that an antecedent or background cause of [a patient's] schizophrenia was an 'oppression by spirits of fear'." Read more via SBS