Press conference with Minister Butler, Adelaide – 29 May

LOUISE MILLER-FROST, MEMBER FOR BOOTHBY: Hi, my name is Louise-Miller Frost. I’m the Member for Boothby, and it is my absolute honour to welcome Mark Butler, the Minister of Health, here to Glengowrie Medical Centre and also David Lloyd from the Heart Foundation.
 
The Heart Health Checks have been such an important initiative over the last few years. We know that the burden of health associated with heart disease and the deaths that come from that are a really significant factor in Australian community, and so many of the symptoms are invisible. Having a Heart Health Check is such an important thing for your health and your longevity. I will throw over to the Minister.
 
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: Thanks, Louise. It's terrific to be back in Boothby with the re-elected Louise Miller-Frost, who got a terrific swing really re-endorsing her hard work as a local member in this part of Adelaide.
 
Louise is right. I'm so glad to be here with the Heart Foundation that has been working so hard for decades and decades to reduce the incidence of heart disease, particularly deaths through heart disease here in Australia. And they, in Australia, have done a marvellous job over the last 50 years. There has been a huge reduction in death rates through cardiovascular disease over the last 50 years, for your concerted action through public health experts, organisations like the Heart Foundation, and ordinary Australians making really significant changes to their lifestyle, particularly around smoking. We’ve seen with the cut in smoking rates and wonderful new medicines that are able to cut your cholesterol and reduce your blood pressure, a very significant reduction in heart disease and an even bigger reduction in deaths through heart disease here in Australia and reflected really around the Western world. But it is still a very serious condition. More than 400 Australians every day are hospitalised because of heart disease. Still responsible for about 1 in 10 Australian deaths. There is just so much more we can do to reduce mortality and to reduce morbidity through heart disease, and I know that is the mission that David Lloyd and the Heart Foundation pursue every single day.
 
Around 2.5 million Australians are at risk of a heart attack or a stroke over the next five years, and many of those Australians are not aware of that risk. But through getting a Heart Health Check from your GP, particularly GPs using the CVD, the cardiovascular disease guidelines, and risk calculator that we announced here at Glengowrie a couple of years ago, people are able to learn about their risk and discuss with their GP changes to their lifestyle or perhaps even starting to go onto a medicine to manage high blood pressure or high cholesterol. But you've got to have that discussion, and you've got to have that assessment. This has been in place now, been trialled for about six years. It had some ongoing funding allocated to it a couple of years ago, and I'm delighted, particularly because of the advocacy of the Heart Foundation, that our government has put in place ongoing funding for this really important assessment. Everyone over the age of 45 should talk to their GP about getting a Heart Health Check. It takes less than 30 minutes, and it could save your life. If you're over 30 and you have diabetes, if you're over 30 and a First Nations Australian, you should have exactly that conversation with a GP as well. This has been remarkably successful. David will talk about the number of Australians who have taken up this check with their GP. But there's even more progress that we could make, and I'm really confident, as we've put in place the ongoing funding, it is going to make a real difference to the health of Australians. I'll hand over to David now.
 
DAVID LLOYD, NATIONAL HEART FOUNDATION OF AUSTRALIA CEO: Thank you, Minister. My name is David Lloyd. I'm CEO of the National Heart Foundation, and I have to say I'm absolutely thrilled that we have this three-year extension for the Heart Health Check.
 
As the Minister said, there are a very large number of people. We think it could be up to 8 million Australians who should have this Heart Health Check because 2.5 million of them are walking around with heart disease and they don’t need it. The silent risk factors that are there, the GP using the risk calculator and the risk assessment tools that we've developed can identify. Now, so far, 870,000 Australians have availed themselves of this check over the six years, and the thing I want to say about that number is that the first 400,000 took four years and the next 400,000 took two years. The news is out there. The news is getting out to communities where this check is most needed. We think, over the next three years, that could be another 1.5 million, which means 2.5 million Australians will have had a Heart Health Check with their GP.
 
Now, you're starting to get to a point where perhaps 20 per cent of the eligible population around Australia has had their risk assessed. And because they've had it assessed they know what their risk factors are and they can manage it and they are pushing the chance of actually having a heart event further and further aback, hopefully forever. That’s a massive thing. We think the Heart Health Check is probably the single most important weapon that we have in our own reef for fighting heart disease over the next few years.
 
Thank you, Minister, for the extension. At the Heart Foundation, we pledge to do everything we can to make the most of it. Every year, we run campaigns to make clinicians and communities aware of it, particularly in Heart Week. Some of you may remember we had Heart Week in Australia three weeks ago. During that time, when we're talking widely through media, through other outlets, about the importance of a Heart Health Check, it absolutely goes through the roof. It more than doubles the number of people going for their Heart Health Check during that time. That's our responsibility as the Heart Foundation, to pick up what the government has done in offering us this further three years and make sure that it gets into all of the communities who need it most. We’re absolutely delighted, and again, I want to thank you, Minister, for giving us this extra time to make a difference. Thank you.
 
KIMBERLEY KERR, HEART DISEASE PATIENT: Hello, my name is Kimberley Kerr and I've been invited to speak today to share my story of heart disease.
 
My story starts back in February 2021 when I went to my GP just for a general check-up. She took my blood pressure and it was very high. She put me on medication, wanted me to come back in a few weeks for further testing just because I was quite young, I was 36 at the time, so she just wanted to make sure that everything was okay. Went back in a few weeks, had an ECG and she just thought, I'm not quite comfortable with this. Send you off to a cardiologist just for peace of mind. Following week off I went to the cardiologist. She reviewed me, thought I was probably fairly low risk, but decided let's do a stress test or a treadmill test and an echocardiogram, an ultrasound of the heart. Just because I've been referred, may as well.
 
I booked that in, but the following week was when things started to go downhill for my family. My dad, at the age of 66, passed away suddenly. We didn't know what the cause was at the time, but we have later found out it was heart disease. That was obviously quite a shock. And two a half weeks later was when I was due to go back to have my test, which was five days after his funeral. I was really very emotional, didn't really want to go, and almost just cancelled that test. Luckily, I did go because I had the test and what we found out was that I had a heart defect, a bicuspid aortic valve, and what that can do is it can lead to either heart failure or aortic dissection, which obviously has poor outcomes. I had a discussion, looked at my family history, which is where my dad's passing came up, and my dad's brother, my uncle, also passed away suddenly at the age of 44 many years earlier. We don't know the cause, but we suspect it's heart disease. Based on that family history and a few further tests that we had, it was decided that it was time for open-heart surgery for me, which I had in September 2021. Very thankful that that was caught, and I'm here today to tell you the story.

Why we wanted to share this story was for a couple of reasons. Had my dad had a Heart Health Check, we don’t know if the outcome could’ve been different. It might’ve been. He might still be here today. But also, I always put off going back and having my test because I didn’t really think that anything was really wrong. But lucky I did, because we found something and was able to intervene.
 
What I recommend is if you are eligible, go and have a Heart Health Check. Don’t put it off, it just might save your life. Thank you.
 
JOURNALIST: Minister, how important are these sorts of grassroot-level support systems to help to keep people out of our hospitals that are obviously under a lot of pressure?
 
BUTLER: Look, the best way to deal with health challenges like heart disease is get ahead of the curve. We’ve made enormous progress with medicines to treat people with heart disease and with some of those really critical risk factors. But we have tools now that allow us to get right ahead of that curve, identify risk very early on before heart disease actually starts to develop, and certainly before you get to the point of people being hospitalised, or even worse, being at risk of death. That’s why the sort of primary care relationship the patients have with their GP is just so critical. GPs being able to undertake these assessments with the expert guidance of tools that the Heart Foundation have developed and published here over the last couple of years mean that we can prevent an enormous number of hospitalisations and deaths if we continue to see these assessments taken up around the country.
 
JOURNALIST: Just on Healthscope, if that’s alright, you've ruled out a taxpayer bailout for that. Does that mean that you're willing to see those hospitals closed, and potentially those support systems for people?
 
BUTLER: No, we want to see an orderly, stable sale to a new operator. I'm being told by receivers and by the company itself that there is as much as 12 months of funding available to continue the operation of the 37 Healthscope hospitals across the country, including four here in South Australia. There's the ability for that forbearance from the lenders, from the banks to Healthscope to be extended beyond that 12 months. That gives us a very substantial period of time for the receivers to work through the indications of interest that are already there. They've been quite openly reported in the press. There's quite a deal of interest in the sector in purchasing the Healthscope hospitals. I want to see that take place in an orderly, stable way. In the meantime, I've got an assurance from the company that those many thousands of Australians who have a birth planned or a procedure booked at a Healthscope hospital over coming weeks and months can be very confident, can be completely confident that those will go ahead.
 
JOURNALIST: Has this situation exposed a conflict of goals between profit and health?
 
BUTLER: Private hospitals have always been a very important part of the system that Labor built under Medicare. That system has universal access to free public hospitals at the core of the Medicare principles. Also access to primary care through general practice like this terrific general practice here in Glengowrie, underpinned by Medicare with bulk billing at its core. But we've always had a blended system in Australia that has a private hospital operation, particularly bearing a lot of the responsibility for elective surgery but doing also about one in four births. That viable private hospital operation is critical to the smooth functioning of our broader healthcare system, which is why we are leaning in heavily to ensure that the second largest private hospital operation in the country, Healthscope, is through an orderly sale to a new operator.
 
JOURNALIST: Ryan Park said that private sector would never again intrude on public health, saying that it shouldn't have a place in New South Wales. Is that a view that you then share, or not?
 
BUTLER: Both of us are Labor Health Ministers. Both of us are philosophically opposed to the privatisation of public hospitals. We support private hospitals working as a separate part in the system. But what Ryan Park is dealing with is the privatisation by the previous Liberal government of a public hospital on the northern beaches in Sydney. The first time I dealt with Healthscope was 30 years ago when the Modbury Hospital was outsourced to Healthscope here in South Australia. That outsourcing or privatisation also ended in tears, with the hospital having to be brought back into public hands as well.
 
The Labor Party at federal level, at state level, is ideologically, philosophically committed to public hospitals remaining in public hands. And on a number of occasions now, state Labor governments have had to unwind the privatisation of public hospitals by state Liberal governments, and Ryan Park and Chris Minns are dealing with that right now in New South Wales.
 
JOURNALIST: Would you be happy to see private health insurers coming in and buying these assets?
 
BUTLER: There is a question about the degree of vertical integration that is healthy in our market. Insurers are obviously the funders of the private hospital operations, funded through the private health insurance premiums of millions of Australian households. For a long time now we've had a position in Australia that the funders or the insurers should not also be vertically integrated into the delivery of care services. I know the Australian Medical Association and other stakeholders have a strong view about that. We would want to look at that very, very closely before we saw any further vertical integration between insurers into the delivery of care.
 
JOURNALIST: Is it disappointing Sussan Ley has promoted women over men?
 
BUTLER: Has promoted men over women?
 
JOURNALIST: Women over men it says here.
 
BUTLER: I think that might be a typo, because what we’ve seen is a number of women punted from Shadow Cabinet and replaced by men, and that just shows again that the Liberal Party, and the Coalition more broadly, just hasn't got the message about the representation of women in Australian politics. We are now a government that is about 57 per cent women. We’ve worked hard as a party over the last 30 years to get to that point. 30 years ago, about 20 per cent of our federal caucus were women; we’re now 57 per cent through hard determined work, recognising not only is it the proper and fair thing to do, it also delivers a better party into the Parliament. We more closely reflect the community, and the Liberal Party just hasn’t got that message, and Sussan Ley certainly hasn’t got that message.
 
JOURNALIST: Will the Government head a Productivity Commission report into work from home, and make sure the public service has hybrid work models?
 
BUTLER: As I understand it, the Productivity Commission has today delivered a report on work from home. Obviously, we'll be working through that report very carefully over coming days and weeks. We support, as a big employer through the Australian Public Service good, strong working from home arrangements. We know in a competitive labour market having good work from home arrangements are an important way of attracting the best talent to your enterprise, in our case to the APS, the Australian Public Service. We also know that it's a good thing for working families, working mothers in particular. The Minister for the Public Service, Katy Gallagher, has asked the Public Service Commission to provide her with a report on current working from home arrangements in the APS, the Australian Public Service, to ensure that we’ve got that best balance.
 
JOURNALIST: Just a couple more. What do you make of the US Court blocking Trump’s sweeping tariffs, citing overreach of authority – is this welcome?
 
BUTLER: We’re aware of reports that have only really emerged over the last couple of hours of the US Federal Court decision around the legality or constitutionality of the reciprocal tariffs, the so-called reciprocal tariffs put in place by President Trump. They are, of course, tariffs that we have consistently said are completely unjustified in Australia's case. We understand there may be further court action. We're considering and going through that judgement really as I speak now. It's only been released in the last couple of hours, but we maintain our position. Any so-called reciprocal tariffs on Australia are completely unjustified.
 
JOURNALIST: Just on the NDIS quickly, do you think that funding for that will need to be revisited at all in this term?
 
BUTLER: No, we've got a very clear strategy around the NDIS. It's a strategy agreed with state governments who have a level of co-ownership of the NDIS. The NDIS is just a fantastic social reform that as the Labor Party that initiated it, we're very proud of. It has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Australian people living with a disability. But all governments, state and federal, Labor and Liberal, have recognised the need to get some of the growth rates that we’ve seen over recent years of the NDIS back to a more manageable and sustainable level. When we came to government a few years ago, the NDIS expenditure was growing at about 22 per cent. We’re on track for the target that was agreed by all governments, state, federal and territory, to get that growth rate down to 8 per cent, which is much more sustainable for the scheme itself and for taxpayer budgets more broadly.
 
JOURNALIST: Just one more, has the PM secured a meeting with Trump at G7, or around the G7?
 
BUTLER: The Prime Minister said before the election that he had had discussions with the US President about them meeting. That would be a priority for the Prime Minister early in the term if he were re-elected, and I’m sure that remains the case. Of course, he only recently had his third substantial telephone discussion with the US President. We continue to engage with obviously such an important ally very closely. Thanks, everyone.