Radio interview with Minister Butler, 5AA – 26 September 2025

DAVID PENBERTHY, HOST: We did breaking at eight a couple of days ago about the fact that the Chair of Bedford Industries had quit under a cloud, no reflection of her personal capacity. Obviously, there’s been a lot of decisions that had been made at the management level that have really come back to bite Bedford. Its future is looking pretty sketchy. And we are pleased now to be joined by the Federal Health Minister, Mark Butler, to discuss that and other issues. Mark Butler, good morning, Minister, and thanks for your time.
 
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: Morning.
 
PENBERTHY: What is the latest on Bedford?
 
BUTLER: You’re right to say that Bedford’s in pretty deep financial trouble. The deeper we dig, the worse the financial position of Bedford appears to be. Your listeners might remember that some weeks ago now, the Premier funded McGrathNicol as an independent advisor to restructure the organisation, to come in and really go tooth and nail through the books of Bedford and provide some advice to the board, but also to government about what the future might look like. We’ve received that plan over the last few days. The Premier has written to me a couple of days ago with his views about the plan, and we’re going through it letter by letter, line by line to see what needs to be done to chart a future for this south Australian icon. It’s been part of our history for eight decades, but more importantly right now, supports hundreds and hundreds of Australians in employment, including several hindered who live with a disability.
 
PENBERTHY: Is there potentially a role for the Federal Government to actually step in and manage it?
 
BUTLER: I don’t think we'd be stepping in to manage it. What we'd be looking to do is to make sure that, particularly people who are supported through the NDIS, but others who are supported through the Disability Employment Program have a future. Now, whether that future is with Bedford or someone else is what we're going through right now. Really, the depth of this financial crisis, really, at Bedford is very, very severe, and it appears very clear that there's going to have to be a wholesale restructure of the organisation, that potentially some parts of the business will have to be taken over by others. My priority is to make sure that we do everything we can to support the people who are supported by Bedford and have been for many, many years. But obviously, against that, I've got to balance the fact that time and time again, organisations come to government seeking a taxpayer bailout for essentially financial mismanagement that they've overseen. I've got to balance those judgments.
 
PENBERTHY: Correct, exactly. The other story this week, Minister, MS, the MS foundation hitting the wall in South Australia and the NT, is there anything that the feds can do in that space? Because my understanding is that there's quite a lot of stuff there that foundation provided that could end up falling back on the health system. Things like getting MS nurses to go and meet people living with MS to explain to them how to take their own medications, that's the sort of stuff now, all going to end up happening back in our public hospitals.
 
BUTLER: Absolutely. This was a real shock to us. It was a shock to many, many people who have been supported by this organisation. But we only found out about it through the media like everyone else, unfortunately. As a provider of NDIS services, the organisation had a legal responsibility to give notice to the National Disability Insurance Commission about this, and they didn't do that, unfortunately. We've been playing catch-up, as so many others have been, when they found out about this decision to go into administration through the media, essentially. We've been talking to the administrators. We think that this is a good business, that there is good prospects of someone picking up the work that this organisation has done to support people living with MS for a long period of time now. We think probably as many as 3,000 South Australians are supported by this organisation, including a couple of hundred who are on the NDIS, the National Disability Insurance Scheme. We're now working with the administrator pretty closely to see what the future looks like for, if not this organisation, then at least the services that for a long time have been supported by taxpayers through the government. We want to make sure that support is there in the future for the many South Australians who live with MS.
 
WILL GOODINGS, HOST: Minister, can I ask you about another issue about an extraordinary event that took place in the United States earlier this week, with the US President and indeed his health boss saying that there was a relationship between taking what we call paracetamol during pregnancy and incidents of autism in young people. I've seen you reiterate the Australian health advice, which is that there is no causal link between those two things. That is, there is no evidence to suggest taking paracetamol during pregnancy leads to autism. What's the most up-to-date and recent research that you've seen that gives you confidence that our health professionals are right?
 
BUTLER: This medicine is very heavily researched, and there are lots of pieces over many years. But the two most recent are firstly a piece of research out of Scandinavia, I think Sweden, which followed about 2.4 million children. A very, very big piece of research, and concluded that there was no reason to think there was any causal link between taking what we call Panadol here in Australia, provided you take it, of course, in accordance with the instructions. That was only last year, and this year there was a big piece of research out of Japan that came to exactly that same conclusion.
 
I was very worried when that press conference happened that there would be as many as 200,000 pregnant right now who would be unsure or even afraid of what to do if they fell sick, particularly if they developed a fever, because we know that untreated fever can be dangerous, not only for the woman, but for the fetus as well. We wanted to clear this up very quickly. I asked our medicines authority to review what the American President had said and see whether there was any reason to change our advice. And they came back, the Chief Medical Officer came back very, very quickly, as did pretty much every scientific and medical body in the country, and said, provided you take Panadol in accordance with the instruction, there is no reason to think there's any causal link with autism. This has been very, very deeply studied right around the world, and as I say, two big studies only in the past two years confirm that.
 
PENBERTHY: Yeah, 100 per cent. Hey, just quickly before we let you go, Minister, are the feds going to review the cost of cigarettes? Because it does feel like there's this growing consensus that obviously not through any intent on Nicola Roxon and everybody else who was involved in the big crackdown back in the Rudd era, but the black market's just got a stranglehold on it now.
 
BUTLER: The black market has absolutely exploded around the country. There's no question about that over the last couple of years. The big increases in tobacco excise happened over the last decade, but more recently we've just seen organised crime really take a stranglehold over the illicit tobacco market. It started in Melbourne and it spread right through the country. It means that there is violence and arson taking place as rival gangs try to take control of what is a very high revenue market for them. It bankrolls all of their other criminal activity; their sex trafficking, their drug trafficking, all of the crimes that have very serious victims involved. From a Health Minister's perspective, it is now the biggest threat to our most important public health program, which is to try to help people stop smoking, because we know how many preventable deaths that causes.
 
But time and time again, the advice I get is the real challenge here is enforcement. And here in South Australia, there is a better enforcement regime than anywhere else in the country. I tell every other jurisdiction this. If you want to know what to do, have a look at South Australia. The powers that Andrea Michaels has been given to be able to close stores if they're doing the wrong thing, to be able to take it up to landlords who are letting their tenants flout the law. We’ve got to get better at enforcement, not just at the border but on the ground and South Australia is a real leader in the country at doing that.
 
PENBERTHY: Mark Butler, the Federal Health Minister, packed dance card there. Thanks for joining us this morning on FIVEAA.