Doorstop interview with Minister Butler, Canberra – 2 September 2025

MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: I'm delighted that the Senate last night delivered on another of the Albanese Government's election commitments. Our focus in our first 12 months of the second term is going to be relentlessly on delivering on the promises we made to the Australian people. Last night, we delivered even cheaper medicines. The first 4 waves of cheaper medicines policies delivered in our first term have already saved Australians $1.5 billion at the pharmacy counter in co-payments. The latest measure the Senate passed last night will deliver an additional $200 million in savings every single year. As well, we've frozen the price that pensioners will pay for the rest of the decade because we know that cheaper medicines aren't just good for the hip pocket, although they obviously are, they're also good for your health. They maximise the chance that people are able to afford to fill the script that their doctor has said is important for their health.
 
JOURNALIST: Minister, on aged care, can the government release more Home Care Packages immediately?
 
BUTLER: We're releasing about 2,000 packages into the system every single week. We were going to stop that at 30 June and move to an entirely new system of Support at Home, but we heard a message from providers and from, importantly, older people themselves that they wanted a short delay in order to ensure that they are ready for an entirely new aged care system. As part of that decision, over the period between 1 July and 1 November, which is when the new system takes effect, we've been putting those 2,000 packages or thereabouts into the system every single week as well.
 
JOURNALIST: Those packages aren't new though. They're from people who've either died or moved into residential aged care. So are you ruling out supporting this push from the Coalition and crossbench to have extra packages to help people so they don't have to wait another eight weeks?
 
BUTLER: We've been delivering additional packages, not just the packages as you say that become free because people have moved out of them for some reason. We've been delivering additional packages pretty much every Budget or Budget update. We did it again in the Budget update in December, just before Christmas.
 
JOURNALIST: I’m talking about in this period from now until –
 
BUTLER: And we committed to a very big increase in packages to take effect when the new aged care system comes into operation, and that will now be on 1 November.
 
JOURNALIST: So there will be no extra packages before November?
 
BUTLER: As I said, this was part of a very big funding package, additional Support at Home packages as well as a range of changes to the residential aged care system to take effect with the introduction of the new aged care system, and that will now take effect on 1 November.
 
JOURNALIST: Minister, not everyone in the sector, I know that you're saying that some people in the sector asked for the delay, but this morning people like Ageing Australia, they're saying that they can deal with more home care services now as we speak, and we need those home care services in the system to avoid a massive backlog.
 
BUTLER: I understand what they've been saying over the last little while. But if you have a look at their media commentary in the lead in and after the decision was taken to delay the aged care system's commencement date from 1 November, their message was very clear. They didn't feel that we were ready as a country to move to an entirely new aged care system. They knew what that would mean, which is that the introduction of a new Support at Home system would also be delayed by 4 months. We recognised that by continuing to put the vacant packages back into the system in the interim period.
 
JOURNALIST: We've heard from people like Norma, though, who can't shower on weekends because she doesn't have enough support. So she now can't shower for at least another 8 weeks on weekends. Is that pretty concerning for you? She says it’s not very nice to go to bed dirty.
 
BUTLER: Every older Australian who is waiting for home support, whether that’s sort of meals and transport or a Home Care Package or a hospital procedure, is a signal that we need to do better in hospitals and health and aged care, and we're determined to do that. But we've made very clear what we were elected to do from 2022, and that was catch up on frankly a decade of inaction in reforming the aged care system in the way that we always knew we were going to have to do to be ready for the ageing of the baby boomer generation. We compressed what should have been a decade's reform into 3 short years. I know that put a lot pressure on aged care providers to do a lot of change very quickly. And we passed legislation before December that frankly is the biggest update and change to our aged care system in a generation. This is going to be hard. I'm not going to pretend to listeners or viewers that dealing with the increase in demand we're seeing right now for aged care is going to be easy for any government. But we have focused more energy and resources on aged care, I think, than any other single area of policy in the 3-and-a-bit years since we've been to government, and we're determined to keep doing that.
 
JOURNALIST: Is it a workforce issue that there's just not enough people to do some of these jobs?
 
BUTLER: When we came to government, it was clear that there was a challenge in actually staffing the additional release of Home Care Packages. Residential aged care providers were saying they were having difficulty recruiting and retaining the staff they needed to staff those facilities as well. That's why we focused in our first term lifting the wages of aged care workers, which was frankly long overdue. If you talk to any aged care provider, whether they provide residential care or home care, they will tell you they are finding it much easier to recruit and to retain staff. But look, right across the economy, workers are hard to get in growth areas and they're very hard to get in aged care and in the health sector, I can tell you, in particular. We can't just release packages. We've got to be confident that they won't just sit there abstractly in the system not being able to be delivered because of staff shortages, and that's why that was such a focus of our first term agenda.
 
JOURNALIST: Minister, will the government's changes to the freedom of information system lead to less transparency in government, or more transparency?
 
BUTLER: The Attorney-General will be introducing legislation this week that outline our plans to update freedom of information laws. We are concerned that the current system really doesn't reflect modern technology. We're frankly being inundated by anonymous requests as a government for freedom of information, and we don't know where those requests come from. Many of them we're sure are AI bot generated requests. They may be linked to foreign actors, foreign powers, criminal gangs. We just don't know enough about the inundation of requests that are taking up so much taxpayer resource. We want to update this to make it very clear that where there is a case for release, of course taxpayer resources will be put in place to ensure that release happens. We're going to introduce a modest charging system that reflects what happens at the state and territory level but of course will exempt people who are making an application for the release of their own personal information, which is about, as I understand it, about 70 per cent of all cases.
 
This legislation will be introduced this week. It will probably go through the usual committee inquiry process. People will have a chance to have their say about that legislation as it proceeds through the parliament. But this is a really important modernisation of a system that frankly hasn't kept with technology.
 
JOURNALIST: But as a pretty fundamental pillar in the government accountability system, though, like, take for granted what you said about AI-generated requests and so forth, nuisance requests and that sort of thing. There's still 30 per cent of those requests that you say 70 per cent are people's personal information, 30 per cent are journalists, they're politicians, they're staffers. I imagine you in your office made countless FOI requests when you were in Opposition. Should there not be some sort of exemption system for genuine public interest requests, like from journalists, like from politicians, like from staffers?
 
BUTLER: Someone has to pay for these requests to be processed. Either taxpayers pay for them or people seeking access to that information, whether it's to populate the media that they earn money from or whether it's a business group or someone else seeking access to that information, so someone has to pay for it. Either taxpayers pay for it or the organisational company seeking information has to pay for it.
 
We've taken the view, as state governments have, that a modest charging environment is consistent with the usual cost-recovery principles the government has had in place for probably 3 decades now. As I said, it's important though, if an individual citizen is seeking the release of their own information, they should be able to get that for free. That would be underwritten by taxpayers.
 
JOURNALIST: Just in light of the protests this weekend, do you think we've given the Nazis too much notoriety, which is what they crave?
 
BUTLER: There's always that balance that we all need to strike, whether we're politicians or media organisations. Every time we report on this sort of hate and intolerance, we give people who are spouting it a bit of a platform. That's why it's so important that an alternative voice is put in place, that we counter that hate, counter that attempt to divide the country with a message of social cohesion and tolerance. That's what I think so many Australians have been trying to do since those weekend rallies.
 
JOURNALIST: And just on that as well, we've managed to outlaw teens posting their crimes online. Why isn't this something that we could apply to this group as well?
 
BUTLER: What we've done at a federal level in our first term is to pass some pretty landmark hate speech laws and done things like ban the Nazi salute. I've read that the New South Wales Police are looking at whether some of the rallies have breached the hate speech laws in New South Wales. There are investigations going on in Victoria as well. We should constantly be looking at all of those laws at the federal and state and making sure they keep up with technology.
 
JOURNALIST: Minister, how concerned is the government about the Quad Alliance? We're seeing the Indian Prime Minister in China at the moment with Putin, with Xi. Is the Prime Minister concerned that the alliance with India and America is fracturing?
 
BUTLER: I'll leave that question to the Foreign Minister to respond to.
 
JOURNALIST: Can I ask about IVF? You were signalling it in your interview there, how soon do you expect there could be a national regulator set up?
 
BUTLER: As I said earlier this morning, I think parents have been really shaken by the series of reports that have come out over the last several months about the operations of our IVF industry. This is pretty mainstream now. About 20,000 IVF babies are born every year, every year. I'm the father of a beautiful IVF baby. I have experience of that trust that you place in IVF operators. I think parents have been pretty confident in the past that we have a world-leading IVF sector but have frankly had that confidence shaken over the past few months. That's why when we last met as a group of health ministers we resolved to undertake a rapid review of our laws. They are all at state and territory level right now because this IVF system grew out of state and territory children’s hospitals. When we receive that rapid review next week, when we meet in Perth next Friday, I think we want to see some really solid recommendations about national regulation, frankly about taking regulation out of the hands of the industry itself. For the entire life of IVF, it's largely been self-regulated and I think confidence in that system of self-regulation has been deeply shaken by what we've seen over recent months.
 
I'm really looking forward to receiving that review late next week. I'm not going to pre-empt what might be in it and how quickly we could act on those recommendations, but I think the fact that health ministers put it on our agenda immediately and required our officials to bring back a rapid review as quickly as we have, gives you a sense of how seriously all health ministers are taking these reports. Thanks, everyone.