Radio interview with Minister Butler, 2SM – 31 October 2025

CHRIS SMITH, HOST: Mark Butler, the Federal Health Minister, is on the line. Mark Butler, welcome to the Super Radio Network once again.
 
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: Thank you, Chris.
 
SMITH: Breaking news first, and President Trump and China’s President Xi have met, and the American President has described it as an amazing meeting, Xi as an amazing leader. And on a scale of one to 10, he gave him 12. Despite the overuse of adjectives, it’s a significant event, isn’t it?
 
BUTLER: It really does throw us back to the Cold War with two major superpowers. It’s always important superpowers talk to each other. As Churchill said, more jaw-jaw is in all of our interests, not just interests of the Americans and the Chinese. I think all of us breathe a little bit of a sigh of relief when the two most powerful leaders in the world get together. They might not agree on everything, but they start to sort of stand back a bit from some of the decisions that they’ve been sort of edging towards over the past couple of weeks. Decisions that would not just impact their countries but would reverberate through the global economy, including Australia. A very positive meeting; 12 out of 10 is a pretty good rating, but on any judgement it’s good for the world.
 
SMITH: Yeah, it makes us feel good too, I think. And our Prime Minister, your leader, has had a similar amazing experience with Trump. Are we seeing the beginning of a true bromance here, Mark?
 
BUTLER: You know, it’s such an important relationship, the American-Australian one. My dad served alongside Americans in Vietnam. My grandparents, my two grandads did in New Guinea. It’s a relationship that’s not just economic and strategic and cultural, for so many of us, it’s personal, and it really does transcend party politics. I think there was this sort of beat up in a lot of the media that this was going to be a problem because we’re from the Labor Party and Trump’s from the Republican Party. It's never been that way in our history. Reagan and Hawke got on famously well, politically very different at a really significant period in Western history. They got on terrifically well because they know Australia and America have shared interests and shared values. And I just think you saw that last week. It really was a very good meeting for America and for Australia. We did some very important business together.
 
I'm from South Australia. I'm actually from Port Adelaide, which is where the AUKUS submarines are going to be constructed. So getting some certainty over AUKUS for my community, but for Australia more broadly, was incredibly important. But the critical minerals deal, particularly given the position that then-President Xi Jinping from China had set out about trying to constrain exports of critical minerals and rare earths to the rest of the world, that was a really important deal for the rest of the world, for the Western Alliance in particular, but particularly for Australian suppliers. Huge economic benefits to Australia.
 
SMITH: Yeah, the Prime Minister has certainly played this very, very well. On to your portfolio, bulk billing, and you've warned GPs they need to get on board with it before you replace the carrot with a stick. Doctors say they appreciate the additional funding to Medicare, but have you got the settings right? Because I'm getting feedback from doctors on the open line who are saying it's still not enough for me to make the switch.
 
BUTLER: Let's step back a bit. A few years ago, doctors, GPs particularly, were doing it very tough. The Medicare rebate had been frozen for a number of years and the College of GPs basically called on their members to stop bulk billing, and bulk billing started to slide very, very sharply. Since then, we've delivered the three biggest increases to the Medicare rebate in 30 years. The first biggest, second biggest, third biggest. And on top of that, we've piled money into bulk billing because for us, that really is the beating heart of Medicare. A couple of years ago, we tripled the bulk billing payment that GPs get to bulk bill pensioners and concession card holders and children, and that's turned bulk billing around for those Australians. It’s now at about 92 per cent for those 11 million Australians. But for people without a concession card, bulk billing has continued to slide. And most of those people are not wealthy by any means. If you're on $40,000, you don't get a concession card, and that's not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. Those people are finding it much, much harder to afford to go to the doctor if their GP is charging them a gap and afford to fill all their scripts as well. That's why we're really focusing on that cohort, not just people with a concession card. We've done a lot for them. But now our focus is on people who just fall outside those thresholds, who end up paying a gap to the GP, paying a lot for their medicines. What we're trying to do is bring down their medicines prices and get rid of these gap fees for those Australians.
 
SMITH: What is your intervention if they don't play ball? You mentioned that yesterday. Is the intervention setting up one of these new clinics next door and punishing the clinic that exists?
 
BUTLER: The point I was making over the last couple of days is that there's a huge amount of variation in bulk billing across the country. The best bulk billing rates are actually in Sydney, where it's more expensive than anywhere else to run a business. If you move over or to Newcastle or to Canberra, for example, the bulk billing rate plummets. Explain to me, I'm saying this rhetorically, but explain to me why you get a 95 per cent bulk billing rate in Western Sydney, where the rent's high, property prices are high, and that rate plummets when you move to Newcastle or the Hunter Valley? And you see the same in Canberra, very stubborn low bulk billing rates. Already, I've said that we'll be intervening in the Canberra market. We'll be funding some new general practices to go into the market on the condition they're fully bulk billing to shake the show up a bit.
 
Now, we think we've got the settings right. We've looked at what GPs bill now and we've calculated the funding that rolls out from tomorrow, from 1 November, to ensure that three quarters of general practices will be better off if they move to 100 per cent bulk billing. The GPs will be better off, the general practice will be better off and most importantly, patients will be much better off. Two years ago, Chris, a full-time fully bulk billing GP was earning on average $280,000. That's after they paid their practice costs. From Monday, in the cities, they'll earn $415,000. That's a $135,000 a year increase in just two years. And if they're in the country, in a small rural town, for example, they'll get even more because the incentives are higher. That figure would be more like $490,000. And that's why already 1,000 practices have told us this week, today they're charging a gap fee, on Monday they'll be fully bulk billing.
 
SMITH: Well, that's a good result. That's a good result, because we do want to get to the stage that Anthony Albanese promised every single day of the election campaign, you'll only need a Medicare card.
 
BUTLER: Totally. We've always been very clear about that as the Labor Party. Doctors' groups in the ‘80s when we were introducing Medicare strongly opposed bulk billing. John Howard did at the time as well. But we said, look, you pay your Medicare levy, you pay your taxes. This is not a private service. At the end of the day, healthcare is a public service. Now, it's being delivered by private businesses, but it's being funded by taxpayers. And so we unapologetically say people should be able to go to their doctor for free. Bulk billing for us has always been the beating heart of Medicare. It was in real trouble three years ago. We've put enormous energy and a lot of taxpayer dollars into turning that around, and I'm very confident. It's not going to change overnight. We've got a thousand practices saying they'll change over the weekend, but that number is increasing every single day. I'm confident we'll continue to grow because it is in their interest, the doctor's interest, as much as patients.
 
SMITH: Alright, A question without notice. I had a caller yesterday who just came from her clinic who said to me that at her latest visit, she was encouraged to sign up to MyMedicare. Now I must have been asleep the day this was announced, because I did not know what MyMedicare was. She says they were pretty insistent. Is there a financial incentive for doctors to sign up patients to MyMedicare? What's it about?
 
BUTLER: No, there's no incentive particularly for doctors. What it is, is a scheme we started, we've been trying to do this as a country for many years now, try and sort of get a stronger relationship between patients and their general practice. Over time, I think there will be really tangible benefits to registering with your doctor. Already you have additional telehealth entitlements, the ability to talk to your doctor over video or over the phone if you're registered with them, because that gives us confidence there's a relationship there. There is frankly, a bit too much telehealth going on in the community with doctors that have never met the patient. They're prescribing medicines  without ever meeting the patient. We do want to get some sort of guardrails around what is a terrific technology and MyMedicare is one of them.
 
But over time, I think we'll also be looking at new funding models that will be able to be used for patients that have a really clear established relationship with their GP. And for the Government, the evidence of that relationship is their registration. The patient doesn't have to pay anything for it. Government's not paying GPs for it, so it's not as if they're doing that because they get money. They're doing that because in an era where more and more people have more complex chronic disease that needs ongoing management by their doctor, really solidifying and strengthening that relationship is a really critical objective of ours.
 
SMITH: Okay, next topic, the under-16 social media ban, and there is a health link to this. If banning under-16s from social media is about protecting their mental health and preventing suicide, your department has to be involved, I guess. And it's well thought through, except for the ban on YouTube, which is dumb. But anyway, how will you know it works? Is there a plan to measure it? Because I heard from Ian Hickey yesterday who was saying it could have the reverse effect. You take their teddy bear away, and all of a sudden they've got mental health problems.
 
BUTLER: We're very confident this is going to be overwhelmingly in the interest of young people. And parents know that too, which is why in overwhelming numbers they're backing us. As we've been working through this with state governments, with health experts and obviously with social media people, it's become clearer and clearer to us that this is something we just have to do. Your listeners, whether they're parents or grandparents of young people and teenagers would know there's just been this seismic shift in a decade or a little more than a decade in how young people interact with the world. I saw a school bus the other day, Chris, and you'll remember school buses in our day were pretty robust environments, but they were important places to get to know people, to learn social skills, to toughen up a little bit perhaps. I was driving past this school bus, and every single kid was looking down at their phone. They weren't interacting. What they're looking at on the phone, worst of all, is so often damaging to them.
 
SMITH: Well, I've seen kids on buses from a GPS school in Sydney, 13 years of age, they would not have been older than that, looking at porn on the way to school.
 
BUTLER: Yeah, that's right, seven out of 10 kids between the age of 10 and 15 have been exposed to explicit content online. Early teenagers, and I'm not talking 18, 19-year-olds, but 12, 13, 14-year-olds, one in three tell us that they've been subject to hurtful comments online. Now, hurtful comments always happen. We all got it in the playground, but it came out of someone's mouth and it disappeared. What young people feel about it staying online forever for everyone to read is quite different.
 
SMITH: So you're going to have markers. Are you going to be able to tell us in a year whether it's worked or not?
 
BUTLER: Absolutely. We're taking this very seriously. The Assistant Minister for Mental Health who works with me only had a roundtable last week I think, or the week before with Anika Wells, the Communications Minister and all of the youth mental health organisations. We're very confident this is going to be a plus.
 
SMITH: Okay.
 
BUTLER: This is going to be very good for their mental health, but we will track it very carefully. The rest of the world is watching very carefully. They see us as a real leader in this area. Can I just give you quickly one example of where we led as well? Taking phones off kids in schools. This was controversial. Still in America and other places, they're debating whether to do it. Talk to any school principal and overnight it changed that school environment. Their learning behaviour is up. Going out into the schoolyard again.
 
SMITH: Great decision.
 
BUTLER: Kids are playing with each other again.
 
SMITH: Great decision.
 
BUTLER: A terrific decision. It's going to be tough. Parents need the resources. They should go to esafety.gov.au, parents and grandparents, because there will be a bit of withdrawal symptoms, but this is overwhelmingly a terrific decision I'm really proud of.
 
SMITH: Okay. Mark Butler, great to have you on the program. Thank you for your time.
 
BUTLER: Thanks, Chris.