Radio interview with Minister Butler, 5AA Mornings – 19 June 2025

GRAEME GOODINGS, HOST: Well, firstly, I would like to welcome our special guest this morning, Health Minister Mark Butler. Minister, good morning to you.
 
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: Morning, Graeme.
 
GOODINGS: Thanks for coming in today.
 
BUTLER: My pleasure.
 
GOODINGS: We hopefully will have a lot of questions from our listeners. Firstly, though, a new term has started, what’s your major focus?
 
BUTLER: Our focus over the course of the next three years, but particularly as we get going will be on implementing the promises we made to the Australian people. In my portfolios of Health and Aged Care and now also Disabilities, there were many of them. Right at the core is the promises we made around bulk billing, to extend bulk billing support to all Australians, not just those with a concession card. We want to get that bulk billing rate back up to 90 per cent.
 
We’ve got cheaper medicines policies that we’ll be introducing into the Parliament as soon as we get back, to drop the maximum co-payment people pay for their medicines from 1 January. We’ve also frozen medicine prices for pensioners for the rest of the decade, and we’ve also got 50 more Medicare Urgent Care Clinics we want to roll out, added to the 87 that we opened in the last term of Parliament. There’s a lot to do, implementing the promises we made to the Australian people at the election.
 
GOODINGS: Now, there are a lot of concerned FIVEAA listeners that have phoned this program saying they're facing increased pathology bills from 1 July. Evidently, the Federal Government is cutting $356 million from pathology services. What can you say to those people?
 
BUTLER: That's just not right. That is an incredibly misleading position that is being put by the three very big pathology companies, very, very big companies, made billions of dollars in profits during the pandemic through the pretty high payments they received for COVID testing, and are now seeking to prop up those profits with what I think is an incredibly misleading campaign. We've made some changes to vitamin B testing and also urine testing that were recommended to us by the relevant clinicians. There was a taskforce that said there's too much of that testing going on, not only is it an inefficient way to use taxpayer money, it's clinically not proper.
 
If you look at the public pathology companies, so SA Pathology here in South Australia, Graeme, they have applauded the decision we've taken. They don't want to see unnecessary pathology testing take place. But the big profit-making companies that make a whole lot of money out of, frankly, unnecessary tests, they're trying to run this campaign that there's been a cut. What we did was we actually reintroduced indexation, so increases to pathology payments for the first time in 25 years. They're getting more money from us from the last budget, not less. This misleading campaign is an incredibly irresponsible thing that the three big pathology companies are doing, and it will have consequences. I am taking advice that if they start putting in place co-payments in an area which is now over 99 per cent bulk billed, on the back of a misleading campaign, I'm telling those three companies there will be very serious consequences.
 
GOODINGS: We have a text from Russell, who wants to know: “Is the blood test for prostate tests going to be free?”
 
BUTLER: Again, also, we have been receiving new guidelines about the best way to test for prostate cancer. As many of your listeners will know, certainly the male listeners, this is a difficult area because testing for prostate cancer can have in itself negative consequences if it's a false positive. We're constantly getting updated clinical advice about the best way in which to test for the most common cancer. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer for men and the Prostate Cancer Foundation, which is the peak body in this area, brings together clinicians, the patient groups. They currently have some draft clinical guidelines that are out for comment right now. I expect that they will be finalised in the second half of this year. This is the first time we've updated those guidelines since I think 2016. We funded them to do that work, and I want to make sure that Australian men have access to the best, up-to-date clinical advice and support in an area that is a very big issue for Australia's men.
 
GOODINGS: Thanks for that, Minister. We have Wendy on the line. Wendy, you have a question for the Health Minister?
 
CALLER WENDY: Yes. It's nice talking to you both. Last year, I was advised by my doctor to have a RSV injection, which I paid over $338 for. I didn't mind paying for it because I thought prevention is better than the illness. Now, no one can tell me if I need another one this year. Chemists can't tell me, my own doctor can't tell me, because all they know is about the young babies that missed out on it from their mothers and the mothers in their last time of pregnancy to get it. So no one can tell me if I need it, it's a one-off injection or I need it annually every year.
 
BUTLER: You need to ask your GP about that, Wendy. RSV is a very serious illness. It's one of the big three respiratory illnesses. As I think you said, we've just put an RSV maternal vaccine for pregnant mums on to the National Immunisation Program. That's the first one we've ever had. It started in February; already well over 60,000 pregnant women have taken that vaccine, and those antibodies then flow through to the foetus and protect their beautiful newborn baby for those crucial few months of their life. I've also, though, been really interested to make sure that some of the companies who are developing vaccines for RSV are putting their vaccines forward for consideration for those vaccines to be added for older Australians, Australians over the age of 65. I expect that work to unfold over the course of this year.
 
GOODINGS: Thank you for your call, Wendy. Now Minister, the Government's vape scheme – really, it's a disaster. Only one in every 1700 practices selling vapes legally. Only about 700 of Australia's 5900 pharmacies participate. They say they're averaging one legal sale every three days. You've gone on record as saying vaping is declining, but there are obvious flaws in the scheme.
 
BUTLER: I don't agree with your characterisation, Graeme. I think this is doing the job I wanted it to do, first of all, which was to take the vapes out of the hands of our kids. The first thing I did was put in place an import restriction to stop these things coming into the country in the first place. They were flooding into the country under the old regime. And since that time, our hard-working Border Force officials have seized almost 10 million of these things at the border. We also, though, need to shut down the sale of those vapes on the ground out of retail premises. Vape stores have shut. Every one of the seven or eight vape stores that were open in my electorate in Hindmarsh is now shut. But I do recognise that some retail premises, convenience stores, tobacconists, are still selling vapes against the law, and they need to be brought to court and prosecuted for that.
 
Now, in your introduction, you were talking about the terrific work Andrea Michaels is doing here in South Australia. It is the leading work in the country to crack down on illicit tobacco and the illegal sale of vapes. Remember, this is bankrolling organised crime at the end of the day. These are the organisations that are controlling this market, so we need to do more on enforcement. I never said this was easy. We're battling Big Tobacco on the one hand and organised crime on the other. This is a tough fight. But I will say, and I will reassure your listeners who are worried about their kids or their grandkids doing this stuff, the research that we've got, very credible research, shows that vaping rates among very young Australians, here in South Australia, teenagers essentially are down 30 per cent already. School suspensions as a result of vaping in South Australia have halved over the last 12 months. Principals and teachers were telling us this was the number one behavioural issue in their schools. Suspensions have halved. Vaping rates among older adults, sort of mid-20s and up, they've halved as well. We are making a difference taking these vapes out of the hands of our kids.
 
But, look, I don't pretend this was ever going to be easy. I said that at the time we embarked upon this. We have to keep going. This is bankrolling- not only is it hurting the health of our young Australians, this is bankrolling the work of organised crime. Every time you buy a pack of illicit cigarettes, every time you buy an illegal vape, you are contributing money to organised criminal gangs to bankroll their drug trafficking, their sex trafficking activities, and we just have to remember that.
 
GOODINGS: We have Health Minister Mark Butler in the studio. If you have a question for the Minister, he's only too happy to take your call.
 
Something, Minister, we were talking about, mental health, it's a major issue. There's no question about that in Australia at the moment. The statistics are revealing that it's growing, particularly among young people. It's putting a huge burden on the public health system. What are your steps to, I know it's not something that's going to be overcome overnight, what can you do in the mental health arena?
 
BUTLER: Let me talk about young people. Mental health is unique, really, in health. Most health issues tend to emerge in middle age and older, but mental health tends to emerge when you're young. If you're going to have a mental illness at any point in your lifetime, it probably will have emerged before you're 25. Two-thirds will emerge before 21, and three-quarters of mental health issues will already have hit by the time someone turns 25. What we've learned over the last couple of decades is you've got to build mental health services that young people feel comfortable going to. When I was young, which admittedly is a long time ago, if you had a mental health issue, you were expected to go to mum and dad's GP if you were a teenager. Unsurprisingly, people didn’t do that.
 
We've been busy really building youth mental health services like Headspace and a lot online, a lot of digital services, but they're becoming overwhelmed because of that increase you talk about in mental distress among young people. Particularly, younger girls and women. At the last election campaign, we promised to do a couple of things. One, expand the existing services we have, but also introduce new services. They address what the former Australian of the Year, Pat McGorry, calls the missing middle. Services for people or young people who have quite complex needs that, frankly, are a bit beyond those Headspace services or GPs or psychologists to look after, but aren't yet quite as extreme or severe that they would be admitted to a hospital.
 
We're going to build more of these missing middle services. We put a lot of money into that at the election campaign. We'll be working on that. But we also want to get sort of upstream to try and work out why is there such a high level of mental distress among our young people now. We're pretty confident, although the research is still coming, we're pretty confident social media is playing a role. That's why, frankly, the rest of the world is watching what we are doing here in Australia to ban the use of social media among kids under 16. Like everyone around the world is watching this, particularly the English-speaking world – the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, New Zealand. They're experiencing exactly the same levels of mental distress among their young people. And everyone is now starting to point the finger at phones and social media.
 
What we've done to take phones out of schools, again, the rest of the world is looking at that. When I talk to principals, that has changed school life almost overnight. Kids are playing together again. They're talking to each other again. Their learning behaviour has improved, all because of us taking those phones out of their hands. And we're very confident that social media ban, that the big tech companies are going to fight tooth and nail but putting in place that social media ban is going to be a really important way to improve the mental health of our young people. Yes, we'll roll out new services, but we've also got to start to explore why are young Australians today experiencing such higher levels of mental distress than seems to have been the case 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago.
 
GOODINGS: We have Health Minister Mark Butler in the studio. If you have a question of the Minister, give us a call right now. Minister, from the text line: “Hi Graeme, what can the Minister do to make sure you get an appointment at a GP when a person is unwell, not a week or two later? Also, what can the Minister to do to make sure GPs take on more new patients when needed, when you need a GP in your area? I've called some GPs and they say they're not taking new patients.” Yeah, Minister, that's something that we hear all too often.
 
BUTLER: We don't have enough GPs, I think is really clear. I think I might have talked to you about this before, Graeme, that not too long ago, about one in two medical graduates would have chosen to become a GP. That's 30 - 40 years ago. Half of the medical school graduates went into general practice. Now it's down to about one in seven, and the other six will go into surgery or anaesthetics or psychiatry or something. We've got to build that general practice workforce. This year, we have more young doctors training to be GPs than at any time in our history, so we have turned that around. Last year was a record. This year is another record. We want to grow that again. We've got more funding in the scheme to train more young Australians as GPs, because we know a lot of our GPs are in the process of retiring. We've got to replace them.
 
But also, we're trying to find ways in the meantime to bring GPs in from overseas, particularly from countries where we have high levels of confidence in their training. The UK, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, those sorts of countries, we're fast tracking their ability to come in and, frankly, fill the gaps we have in the system. In the meantime though, we've got to build other systems. Those Urgent Care Clinics I talked about, they're open seven days a week, 365 days a year. Already seen 1.5 million patients since we started opening them a couple of years ago, and every single person is bulk billed. In addition, we'll be introducing next year a new service called 1800-MEDICARE, where you can get, again, a free nurse triage service and potentially telehealth as well. The nurse after 6:00 PM, if he or she, probably she, thinks you need to see a GP, you'll be clicked over to a telehealth system funded by Medicare, quality assured by Medicare to take some of that pressure off general practice.
 
GOODINGS: Ross from Valley View has called in. Ross, go ahead.
 
CALLER ROSS: Hello to both of you. Yes, Minister, my wife's got dementia and she's been in the Modbury Hospital for seven weeks now. And she had actually gone in for an infection and they cured that, but because she was unwell at the time, I was told that, two doctors and the social worker had said I couldn't take her home because it needed two people to look after her. And so they put us under SACAT. Now, we had a SACAT meeting on 11 June. Now, what happened was my wife screamed because I help change. I go every day. I try and get there between 9:30, 10 o'clock or sometimes 10:30, and I stay sometimes to 8:30 at night. Now, going through the tribunal, I'm now, looks as though I'm going to lose her. The public advocate has made the guardian to make all her lifestyle decisions to her son who lives in Koolunga, who his mental health problems and had a carer with him when they had the meeting.
 
Now, what happens there? And because I had an advanced care directive and I thought it was right, but the person that's the decision maker said: “no, it's not, because it was signed by a nurse at our GP clinic.” But I'd taken it to Tony Zappia's office, and he said everything was correct. And he had photocopied five copies, and now they say it's not correct. So I've lost my power of attorney.
 
BUTLER: Ross, I don't have the circumstances, obviously, of your case. That sounds like it must have been incredibly distressing for you, those last seven weeks where your lovely wife has been in hospital. We might get some details from you, and we can contact you offline and see whether we can help you through this.
 
GOODINGS: Thanks for your call, Ross. Yes, we'll put you back to my producer Patrick. Just one final question, we're just about to run over time, but I have to mention this. The IVF system, can faith be restored in IVF? Monash IVF, two horrific incidents now. A lot of people who are on the IVF program considering it, are wondering, what should I do?
 
BUTLER: My third beautiful child is an IVF baby, and I know the depth of trust that families put in IVF companies. It often feels like you get a miracle baby. It certainly felt like that to my wife and I. And I think what's happened with Monash, with not one case but two cases going so awry, has really hurt the confidence that Australian families have in what has been one of the best systems in the world, delivering 20,000 babies every year. When the health ministers and I met on Friday in Melbourne, we decided to put in place a national independent accreditation system for IVF companies. The fact is, until now, they've essentially been self-regulating, and we think we need to inject some confidence and independence and transparency into that system.
 
We'll be doing that as a matter of priority, and we'll be looking at other ideas about introducing better national standards around the regulation here. We've got to get confidence back into the system. I know families who've either had an IVF baby or are thinking going through this are deeply worried about the media coverage of these two really devastating cases. I know Chris Picton here, health ministers across the country, are determined to get this industry back on track.
 
GOODINGS: Mark Butler, thanks so much for your time today. I appreciate it.
 
BUTLER: Thanks, Graeme.