Radio interview with Minister Butler, ABC Darwin – 28 February 2025

RICK HIND, HOST: Mark Butler is the Federal Minister for Health and Aged Care. Minister.
 
MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: Good morning.
 
JOURNALIST: The nearest maternity hospital in is a long way from Darwin. Excellent midwives, Cathy and her team won a national Medicare award, but they're about to get a lot busier, if that's even possible. Are you going to match the funding you've given Tasmania in the Northern Territory?
 
BUTER: The Northern Territory government under Minister Steven Edgington has been doing a terrific job, working with insurers to pick up the slack that Healthscope is going to leave, having withdrawn their maternity services. I've been watching this very closely, staying in close contact, particularly with Luke Gosling, who's across this as the Federal Member up there. If the Northern Territory Government provides us with any request for assistance, we'd be very open to talking with them about that. The Tasmanian situation is a little different. They rely much more on private births. Probably the highest rate in the country, whereas the Northern Territory has the lowest rate. The Tasmanian government and the private provider down there, Calvary, which will continue to deliver private births in Hobart, requested some money from the Commonwealth government to provide some upgrades to capital.
 
HIND: So essentially to put more beds in, now we'll need to ask for it. Is that the hold up here? If we, if the government asks for more money, they'll get it.
 
BUTLER: The Northern Territory government, like the Tasmanian Government, are responsible for operating their public hospitals. If they need an upgrade to cope with this additional demand and they require some additional funding for that. Of course, we would be open to discussing this, but I want to get back to the first point, which is the primary responsibility for, picking up this slack rests with private health insurers. At the end of the day, Northern Territory families have paid good, hard-earned cash to these insurers with the expectation that they will be supported during this incredibly important part of their lives, giving birth to their beautiful baby. I'm pleased the insurers have been sitting down, hopefully putting some cash on the table, as they should for the Northern Territory  government to be able to pick up this slack. If we can also add value to that, I'm very open to that discussion, but it seems to me that Minister Edgington has worked really well to get the insurers to the table to do what they should do, which is to, give a return to those families on the investment those families have made with their hard earned cash into private health insurance premiums.
 
HIND: Now, Darwin is a defence town. Hobart is not. How big a problem is it that very soon you won't be able to have your baby in a private hospital in Darwin? But you can in Townsville. We're competing with Townsville for defence spots. Isn't this going to be a real drag on getting people to stay and live in the Northern Territory?
 
BUTLER: I think there is definitely a discussion for us to have about the private hospital presence in Darwin. Once, we're through this immediate shock of what Healthscope has done to withdraw maternity services, very rightly, I think Steven Edgington, his officials and insurers, are focused on making sure that the families who are pregnant now, the women who are pregnant now, have some confidence about what their birthing arrangements are going to be over the next several months. But there's no question we need to have a discussion about the private hospital presence going forward. If Healthscope is going to pull part of its operations, or ultimately maybe more of them at some point, we need to make sure that we have a good private hospital presence in Darwin. It's a substantial, vibrant city, as you say, growing as well in its military presence. That, again is something that the private health insurers and the private hospital sector have to take the lead on. At the end of the day, they receive billions and billions of dollars from private health insurance members. We provide them as taxpayers with billions of dollars of subsidy as well. It primarily is their job to make sure that the services are there for their members. Now, government has a job, whether it's the territory government or the Commonwealth, to deal with market failure, as I think your intro described it. But at the end of the day, let's not let the insurers and the private hospital sector off the hook here. They're the ones receiving billions from Australians making a lot of money in profits. They have a responsibility to make sure the services are there for their members.
 
HIND: Let's move on to another of your portfolios, aged care. We spoke to Kim at the Council of the Ageing this week. Her mum spent thirteen months in as an aged care client. She had high needs, she wasn't sick or injured, she was just old. Kim and her sister visited her every day in general wards. But she also pointed out the problems with home care packages involving her dad.
 
KIM, CALLER: My father had the federal funding package because he had dementia and his dementia was getting worse, and it was getting too much for my mum. They needed more support at home,  to care for him. The providers didn't have the people to do it. He had the package there to, fund it. But there were no workers. There were no support workers. Are there not enough?
 
HIND: Are there any signs that aged care is improving in the top end, and we can get aged care clients out of hospital wards at RDH?
 
BUTLER: We're working really closely with the NTG on getting older patients who are clinically able to be discharged out of hospital sooner. We've given them significant funding to start some innovative projects. To do that, we're having some good discussions about potential construction of new aged care facilities. Right around the country, but particularly in the Territory, there just aren't enough beds being built. That's why we work so hard on a new aged care funding system that we delivered through the Parliament just before Christmas. I have to say, with the support of the Opposition, which was a really constructive discussion., But the case you just had on there through one of your listeners is a challenge we have everywhere. It’s not just in the aged care sector. Having enough workers is a challenge. A whole bunch of different parts of the economy are having, and we're having it in aged care and health as well. That's why lifting the wages of aged care workers, which is something we did through the course of this term of Parliament, has been really important. This is some of the most important work in the community that we have. Up until we delivered a big wage increase to aged care workers, you could earn more doing retail, which is important, but arguably not as important as looking after our older members of the community who built this, country, paid their taxes for decades and deserve better in their later years. I'm determined to make sure that when we have a package funded by taxpayers, there are workers there to deliver it. We've got to train more. We've got to pay them frankly what that level of work deserves. And we've delivered quite a bit on this. But I don't pretend we don't need to do more, we do.
 
HIND: Mark Butler, the Australian Private Hospitals Association, we're going to speak to them shortly. They've raised concerns about viability issues for private hospitals for two years. Has the federal government known about this and not done enough to make sure that private hospitals stay viable?
 
BUTLER: We've been working very closely with the private hospitals, maybe not with the fellow who's about to come on, but with the hospitals themselves. Both the not for profits that you and your listeners would be familiar with that have been operating for decades, the Calvary’s , as well as the big for profits. Healthscope is the second biggest, Ramsay is the biggest. We've been working with them all through last year on how we ensure their viability, trying to get a good sense ourselves about their finances. Some of it's very hard to penetrate. Some others aren’t. They're listed on the stock exchange. It's pretty easy to see. We're working with them on these longer-term things that I talked about. How do we make sure they are viable going forward? How do we get that balance right between insurers who fund the private hospitals, and private hospitals themselves? They're constantly arguing about how much money is transferred from insurance companies to hospitals. And that's the nature of a private commercial arrangement, which is what they are. But, you know, as government, we are working with them to try and make sure we have the policy settings right to deliver the sort of services that 15 million Australians, as members of private health insurance company funds, pay their hard-earned cash for.
 
HIND: Mark Butler, the Federal Minister for Health and Aged Care. You have a very busy morning. Thank you for spending some of it with 107 ABC Radio Darwin.
 
BUTLER: My great pleasure, mate.