Radio interview with Minister Butler, 3AW – 21 August 2025

TOM ELLIOTT, HOST: Well, as luck would have it, the Federal Health Minister, Mark Butler, joins us right now. Mr Butler, good morning.
 
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: Morning, Tom. What a beautiful day in Melbourne.
 
ELLIOTT: Well, it is, yes, as I look out the window. Now, look, I spoke to your predecessor, Bill Shorten, in terms of running the NDIS about a year and a half ago, and he agreed that there was a lot of rorting and it had to stop. What are you going to do about that?
 
BUTLER: And he was right, and he put in place some really important measures to start to get a handle on that. The National Audit Office, I think extraordinarily, said that before then there had been no controls on fraud and non-compliance in the NDIS effectively, and what I think your listeners would have seen and read about was really a field day for a whole lot of shonks and rip-off merchants getting into a honeypot. Putting in place a taskforce to crackdown on fraud’s meant we’ve in the last couple of years seen hundreds of investigations, maybe 600, dozens and dozens of search warrants, prosecutions to start to protect those millions of dollars that taxpayers put into this scheme, but importantly, protect the money that participants should be spending on their supports and plans.
 
I said yesterday, we've got to do more on this, but there's still too many shonks, too many fraudsters in this scheme. We need a better system of provider registration so we know exactly who is in there earning a buck off the NDIS, the sort of systems that are commonplace in aged care and veterans care and healthcare.
 
ELLIOTT: Okay. So you're saying the clearing out the rorts, that is already happening. And are you seeing improvements in the NDIS's financial position as a result?
 
BUTLER: When we came to government, when Bill was first made Minister, the growth in the scheme was 22 per cent per year, taxpayers, 22 per cent per year. I mean, extraordinary. We've got that down to just under 11 per cent. We've halved it in the last three years, and we're on track to get it to 8 per cent year, which is the National Cabinet decision, so all the premiers and the Prime Minister, the decision they made back in 2023, and that's a big achievement. There's no question about that. But I said yesterday that 8 per cent is not sustainable in the long term.
 
ELLIOTT: Well, it's not, is it? It's not, because when you look at it, government revenue isn't growing at 8 per cent, the economy doesn't grow at 8 per cent, inflation doesn't run at 8 per cent. So it's still an outlier as far as growth in government expenditure, isn't it?
 
BUTLER: Yeah, to give your listeners a sense, I said yesterday, as a share of the economy or GDP, NDIS growth over the next decade will be the same as the growth in Medicare, aged care, and defence all combined. We've got to get that down. And I said yesterday that we've got to focus on getting to 8 per cent right now, but from next year, we will be focused on getting that growth rate down even further to a more sustainable position. Aged care is growing at 5 per cent while we've got the ageing of the baby boomer generation to come to grips with. So it can do better.
 
ELLIOTT: Alright. Now, what about, I read your article in the Financial Review about this morning, and the other big reform you've mentioned is taking kids with mild autism or other developmental disabilities and moving them into a different program called Thriving Kids. Now, first, how will that work?
 
BUTLER: The first thing to say is let's remember the NDIS was set up for permanent and significant disability, people with profound permanent disability. But what's happened is tens and tens of thousands of kids with relatively mild to moderate needs have ended up on this scheme, largely because it's been the only thing available to parents. I don't blame parents for this. They've had no choice but to go out and wait months and months to get their kids a diagnosis, usually pay thousands of dollars for that, and get onto a scheme that wasn't set up for them. What I want to do is get back to systems that we had in place before the NDIS, systems that people are familiar with, the sort of infant or child and maternal health systems, the local GP and local allied health providers, community health centres, supports in early childhood and in schools. Broad-based systems of support which are going to be much more fit-for-purpose for these children but also, frankly, more efficient for taxpayers.
 
ELLIOTT: Yeah, but that's the thing, isn't it? I mean, if you just say, well, we'll take you out of the NDIS and instead we'll put you, like a 13-year-old who's struggling in school, we'll put you into a thing called Thriving Kids. I mean, is any money really saved? Why is Thriving Kids going to be cheaper per person than the NDIS is?
 
BUTLER: You're tapping into existing systems of support in the first place. What I also talked about yesterday was the degree of over-servicing, frankly, I think there is in the NDIS. The average child with moderate levels of developmental delay is receiving more than 70 therapy sessions a year. Now, I know of no example in the healthcare system where that extent of therapy would be provided. The point about the NDIS though is that they don't have to show the evidence that supports that sort of therapy, whereas in Medicare, we simply wouldn't fund a regimen of therapy like that unless it had been proven to work. There are inefficiencies. There's a degree of over-servicing. There's a lack of pricing discipline that I think we've got to grapple with here. But most importantly, what I'm focused on is getting the right level of support to parents and children who need the support in their community.
 
ELLIOTT: Okay. But you mentioned before, you said that the NDIS is set up to help people with a permanent disability, and then we talked about those childhood disabilities. But I mean, if a kid has mild autism and they're now treated, I think it's from 2027, under Thriving Kids, does that mean when they're 18 that stops because they're no longer a kid or the autism is cured, or what?
 
BUTLER: Now, I recognise autism is a permanent condition for most people and we're not trying to fix it. We're not trying to cure it. We're trying to give people the supports that are appropriate for them. And just to add to what you just said, it wasn't just for permanent disability, it was for permanent and significant disability.
 
ELLIOTT: Okay.
 
BUTLER: In most cases, that's been pretty easy to identify, whether it's acquired brain injury, quadriplegia, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability. All of those numbers have turned out pretty much as we expected 10 years ago. It's this area of developmental delay where kids with relatively mild to moderate levels of need have ended up on a scheme for permanent and significant or profound disability. I do recognise that for most of these children with autism, they will have ongoing support needs, and that will be provided in a different way when they’re children to when they're adults. There are primary care supports, allied health supports, a whole range of other supports that exist for people with relatively mild to moderate levels of autism that is there for their lives but is not significantly disabling in the sense that the NDIS was set up to serve.
 
ELLIOTT: And therefore, hopefully, cheaper to treat. Now, just on another issue, you and I spoke, I think it was  early last year, and you warned us that vapes were the health scourge of our generation, and you wanted them off the streets. And I think I said to you that when I walk home, I go past six shops that are selling vapes illegally. Well, those six shops, I can tell you, are still selling them and no one has shut them down. Are you going to make any progress on this front?
 
BUTLER: We are making progress on vaping rates among young people. I'm really confident about that. We've now got a number of pieces of research that show that kids are vaping less, and importantly, they're smoking less as well. And one of the things I think we talked about, Tom, was the risk that kids would give up the vapes and move to cigarettes, which would be a real problem. That's not happened. What we've also found is that some of the programs we’ve put into our high schools have been highly effective at shifting kids away from vaping. Kids that have received the programs that are now being delivered in every high school are 65 per cent less likely to vape than kids who haven't received the program.
 
ELLIOTT: But the people who sell vapes?
 
BUTLER: We still have a huge job to shut down these stores, and that ultimately is a question of enforcement. Now, different states are at different stages, frankly, in what they're doing here. Some states like my own state of South Australia has given more powers to the authorities to shut these stores down without having to take them to court, but just to shut them down for periods to make sure that there's a really clear disincentive for store owners against doing this. They've got to, particularly in the area of illegal tobacco but vapes as well, they've got to recognise that they're not engaged in a harmless exercise here. Not only is it punching a hole in our public health, but importantly as well, it's giving a whole lot of revenue generally to serious organised criminal gangs who are using it to bankroll really serious criminal activity.
 
ELLIOTT: Well, I agree with you, but I would have thought the solution is fairly obvious. Just maybe you send the Federal Police in, shut down the stores, confiscate the illegal vapes, and keep doing it until they stop. Look, thank you for your time. Mark Butler there, the Federal Health Minister.