Consultant, with one exception per state. Victoria wants 2–3 referees of whom at least two are consultants, so one may be a registrar 1. Queensland takes two reports with at most one from a registrar 2. NSW wants two, at least one a current or recent supervisor 3. SA's BPT excludes registrars entirely 6.
The rules are per campaign, not per opinion. Victoria's PGY2 Match asks for two to three clinical referees who have supervised you in the last 12 months, of whom at least two must be consultants — so exactly one registrar is allowed 1. Queensland's RMO and Registrar campaign requires two referee reports with a maximum of one from a registrar 2. NSW takes two referees, at least one of whom must be a current or last-12-month supervisor, and does the checks after you are invited to interview 3. South Australia requires a minimum of two online referee reports and treats incomplete ones as making you ineligible 4. Tasmania nominates three online 5; the ACT takes two on the Canberra Health Services referee report template, one from your current supervisor 7. Read the one that applies to you before you ask anybody.
Training programs are stricter than jobs. South Australian adult BPT names two consultants from your two most recent clinical rotations and explicitly excludes residents, registrars and academic supervisors, with an optional third FRACP referee 6. CICM goes the other way and requires a senior ICU nurse as one of three 8, and the Royal Children's paediatric JRMO wants two consultants plus a senior nurse 9. Where a non-medical referee is mandated, it is mandated in writing.
The practical read. For a non-training job at your own hospital, a strong registrar reference has got people in 10. For anything competitive, a formal registrar referee alongside consultants reads as a red flag 10 — list the registrar on your CV instead. A consultant who barely knows you will ring the registrar before writing anyway 11.
The counter-argument: in specialties where the nurse or midwife sees more of your work than the boss does, that reference is a positive — in addition to, never instead of, the required consultants 10.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
Include it on your CV, but your formal referees should be consultants, otherwise could be a bit of a red flag.
A decade ago I used a senior reg reference for a job at a different health service. Got the gig.
having a senior midwife as a referee in O&G is often seen as a positive, obviously in excess to the requisite SMO/SR referees
Go for the consultant. They're used to doing this even if they haven't had much day to day with you and will lean heavily on the fellow's/registrar's opinion anyway.
Asked 139 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /refere+/i (a topic-level count that also picks up 'preference' threads). Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in the consultant-versus-registrar threads, balanced so the person who got a job on a registrar reference sits beside the red-flag warning.