Press conference with Minister Butler, Brisbane – 10 June 2026

RENEE COFFEY, MEMBER FOR GRIFFITH: Good morning, and welcome to the Coorparoo Urgent Care Clinic, the new Medicare Urgent Care Clinic we've opened here. This is 1 of 3 in Griffith, adding to the existing Urgent Care Clinic that we've had operating for quite a while in South Brisbane. These clinics have been such a great success in my community. We have had over 40,000 presentations across the clinics in Griffith, and these are people who have urgent medical conditions that are not life-threatening and that means that it's easing a lot of pressure on our health system, on our hospitals. We have a lot of hospitals in the area. They've been a really great success and really well received by the community. So, it's great to welcome Health Minister Mark Butler back to Griffith today to this gorgeous new clinic, and I'm really pleased to be hosting this morning.
 
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: Thanks, Renee, so much for hosting me again. We've visited the South Brisbane clinic, it was one of the first Medicare Urgent Care Clinics we opened back in 2023, down in Woolloongabba, and that's been providing a service to that part of your electorate, a terrific service. I'm so excited we've been able to open this clinic here at Coorparoo at a very trusted general practice that I understand has been providing service to this community for as long as 70 years. And that's really been a focus of this Medicare Urgent Care Clinic program – going out, asking existing general practices whether they're interested in taking their practice to the next level. So not just providing the terrific primary care services that practices like this one have been providing for a very long time, but also to add this Urgent Care Clinic service as well, which is very common overseas but is still a relatively new model of care for Australia.
 
We are opening 137. We've got 136 open so far, and next week the last of our clinics will be opened at Caloundra up on the Sunshine Coast, fulfilling the commitment that the Prime Minister and I made at the last election to bring the network up to 137 clinics. And once that network is fully up and running, we think that the network will see as many as 2 million patients every single year, all fully bulk billed. This clinic and all of the rest of them are open 7 days a week, extended hours, and available for walk-in appointments as well. And as Renee said, it's not only providing a terrific urgent care service for people in their local community when they need it, when they're probably not able to get into their usual doctor. It's also taking pressure off emergency departments, because we know that more than half of the patients coming through these Urgent Care Clinics say that if the clinic was not available to them, they would have fronted up their local hospital emergency department. So taking hundreds and hundreds of thousands of presentations off our busy emergency departments, allowing them to focus on the life-threatening emergencies, the heart attacks, the serious car crashes, the strokes and such like, that they were built and equipped to serve.
 
It's terrific to be at this clinic. Twenty-six will be operating as of next week here in Queensland, providing a really terrific service to local communities. But a centrepiece of our commitment as a government to strengthen Medicare, to deliver more doctors to the system, but particularly to general practice to increase bulk billing, which has started particularly to increase for non-concessional patients since our record investment in November, and to roll out this Medicare Urgent Care Clinic network. We're going to hear a bit from Dr White who practices at this clinic and has some experience before this clinic in urgent care, and then I'm happy to take questions about this or news of the day. Thanks.
 
Dr MITCHELL WHITE: I just wanted say that we think that it's a really important service that we're providing, and it's been very interesting being involved in it from the kind of get-go. And seeing how this clinic is now servicing the community is really good, working with our local GPs, and I think that it's something that we look forward to providing more of in the future.
 
JOURNALIST: There are concerns kids will be cut off from the NDIS before Thriving Kids supports are available. Can you guarantee that won't happen?
 
BUTLER: This is a commitment that I've made since I initiated the discussion about the Thriving Kids program last year, not quite 12 months ago. A commitment that we made to parents and to the community that of course we would not allow young children to fall between 2 stools. I'm very confident that we will have systems in place from 1 January the year after next, so still 18 months away, to support those children. States are busy rolling out or developing their Thriving Kids program. We’ll be ready to roll out our investments as a Commonwealth very soon. And I'm very confident that we'll have systems up and running for families and children with the more low to moderate support needs that we promised last year.
 
JOURNALIST: Minister, are you aware that some families have already been told they could be referred to child protective services if they can't fulfil their parental responsibilities outlined in the NDIS bill, which could see them lose that help from support workers?
 
BUTLER: Sorry, can you repeat that question?
 
JOURNALIST: So are you aware that some families have already been told that they could be referred to child protective services if they can't fulfil their parental responsibilities outlined in the NDIS bill, which could see them lose help from support workers?
 
BUTLER: There's an inquiry underway. It's holding public hearings this week. I think you may be referring to some evidence that's been provided to that inquiry. We're obviously keen to hear the outcomes of that inquiry. We're monitoring the submissions that have been made and the evidence that is given to the public hearings. Of course this entire program, whether it's for children under 9 through the Thriving Kids stream or for older children as well, is all designed to make sure that there are supports there for children and their families that are appropriate to their level of need. So we'll have a look at that submission and the many others that have been made to this inquiry, but I can give an assurance to families, to school communities and to others who care about our young children that these reforms to the NDIS, the other programs of support that we're in the process of developing and rolling out, will remain some of the world's best systems of support for our kids.
 
JOURNALIST: Has your office been contacted by some of these parents who are worried, though, that they could lose their children?
 
BUTLER: I haven't been advised of that. There are many hundreds of submissions being made to the inquiry right now, and we're going through those submissions as the Senate committee is going through those submissions as well, so I can't comment on every single inquiry. Obviously we would take a suggestion like that very seriously. Ultimately, those decisions are made by state governments, so we would engage with state governments who are a partner in this NDIS reform process. But I make the comment I did before – we are absolutely committed of course to making sure that there is a system of supports for kids, whether they're very young kids or slightly older kids over the age of 9 and teenagers that is appropriate to their level of need. Amanda.
 
JOURNALIST: I might just jump in if I can? Thank you. The Business Council of Australia this morning, in one of their submissions to this NDIS inquiry that's going on, has said that the shake-up to the NDIS that your government is rolling out is potentially going to threaten business investment within the sector, potentially make things worse in terms of lowering investment in the sector. Is that something that your government has considered?
 
BUTLER:  I haven't read the full submission from the Business Council but I've read reports of it this morning. I make the point to the Business Council that the NDIS will continue to be a program that grows, albeit at a relatively modest rate over the course of the forward estimates before returning to a growth rate of about 5 per cent a year, which is the sort of growth rate we see in other comparable social programs like Medicare and childcare and the like. This is obviously a really important sustainability measure for the budget.
 
But as I've said a number of times, also really important to ensure that we can secure the future of the NDIS in the long term, secure its social licence as well as secure its fiscal sustainability. And a couple of the things that the Business Council reported to have said in their enquiry I think are really important quality measures as well. Moving to a system that has more providers registered so that the community has confidence that they comply with certain community expectations around their quality, I think is a no-brainer. It's been a recommendation about the NDIS now for several years through the NDIS review and then the commission's work on registration. That will be a risk calibrated approach to registration, so I'd be surprised if the Business Council did not support that.
 
In terms of investment, this will continue to be the largest social program the country has outside of the aged pension. It will continue to be a program of considerably over $50 billion. We may not see the 10 per cent plus growth rates that we've seen over the last several years, but it will still be a very substantial social program for businesses to invest in and provide quality services.
 
JOURNALIST: The union representatives are looking to put a submission to the Fair Work Commission today asking for a 35 per cent pay rise for around 300,000 disability and community workers. Would that just make programs like the NDIS more expensive?
 
BUTLER:The first thing we'd say is we're very proud of our achievements around gender equity and a lot of that has been about the investment in the wages of people who provide health and social care. Aged care has been the most significant of those and the gender pay gap of about 11 per cent now is the equal lowest on record in substantial part because of those investments. They're obviously the right thing to do by the way of those workers but they're also improving our ability to recruit and retain the workforce we need in these growing parts of the social care ecosystem.
 
In terms of the application that I've read about in the paper this morning, we'll obviously have a look at it. We're in the process now, though, of going through the gender undervaluation review that the Fair Work Commission undertook. It has an impact on the disability sector, the NDIS sector, among many other parts of the health and social care system. We're in the process of going through that. Of course, if an application is made to the Fair Work Commission it will be dealt with by the commission in the usual way in accordance with the legislation. And if it has an impact on the social program, we'll look at that. But it's still pretty early in the day for that.
 
JOURNALIST: Minister, you've established a rapid review into the aged care algorithm that's given incorrect funding to dozens of Support at Home participants. Are you concerned that the proposed automated decision-making as part of the NDIS changes could also do the same thing?
 
BUTLER: We're going to be very careful about any use of automated decision making in the NDIS. I've made that clear when we introduced the bill to the parliament some weeks ago. There's obviously a level of automation in government systems right through government, both federal and state. Largely that is focused on more administrative parts of decision making rather than some of the really important decisions around eligibility. As to aged care, there is substantial human involvement in that process, right through the process of deciding a person's eligibility and then what package level they would be entitled to.
 
We've made around 180,000 decisions through this tool. There have been some requests for review, but the number of applications or decisions that have been changed as a result of that process is vanishingly small. We're wanting to look at the way in which the tool is operating obviously, it's relatively new, it's the centrepiece of a really important social program caring for older Australians who deserve the best possible care and dignity given that they built this community. But in the NDIS area, as in other areas of government, of course we take a very careful risk-based approach to using automated decision-making. You will see it more in those very rudimentary administrative parts of decision-making rather than the more quality system, quality decisions that we would want to see overseen by humans.
 
JOURNALIST: But no delay to the NDIS changes? Are you standing firm on that?
 
BUTLER: No, we're very committed to getting these changes through. They roll out really- from relatively soon after the Bill passes over the course of a period of some years. So yes, we want the Bill passed quickly. Yes, we think this is important to get the financial growth of the NDIS back under control. I said when I went to the Press Club several weeks ago that even since December there had been a $13 billion blowout in NDIS costs. So we need to make some changes very quickly.
 
But some of the more fundamental reform will first of all be the subject of very close engagement with the disability sector and with states over the course of the rest of the year, and then we'll roll out in some cases over a period of as long as 3 years starting in 2028.
 
JOURNALIST: Just one quick one from me – this is my last one, Minister. One Nation has asked its supporters to donate around $29 to their campaign against the government. A similar amount of money that the Labor Party was asking for yesterday. Just this morning we've seen on the One Nation website their donations go up by about $70,000 just in the last hour. Is it worrying that One Nation is able to get this kind of support so quickly and that they're actually targeting you and your government particularly in relation to the Budget work promises?
 
BUTLER: It's not a surprise that One Nation as part of this broad right-wing coalition now is targeting Labor. It's essentially an anti-Labor coalition now of 3 parties rather than 2, the Liberal Party, the Nationals and One Nation. So that element of your question is not a surprise, Amanda. But political parties are able to raise funds. I mean, obviously there's the ability nowadays to do it online. So again, that's no particular surprise. We're confident about the program we're rolling out for the country at a difficult time. Some of that involves some difficult changes, including the ones that we've been talking about over the last 5 or 10 minutes in the NDIS. They're difficult changes, but they're the right responsible changes I'm confident to set the country up for the future.
 
Thanks, everyone.