Radio interview with Minister Butler, ABC Mornings Sydney – 20 October 2026

HAMISH MACDONALD, HOST: The Federal Health Minister's fronting the media this morning with an update on 1800MEDICARE since it was launched at the beginning of this year, but obviously, there is a fair bit in the news this morning relating to Helen Haines. I know a lot of people are listening, very keen for updates and more information. The man accused of this attack has been named as Brendan Nugent, a 43-year-old man, who was arrested. He has undergone a mental health assessment. The Federal Health Minister, Mark Butler, is here. Good morning to you.
 
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: Morning, Hamish.
 
MACDONALD: Do you have any further update for us? Do you know any more?
 
BUTLER: No, I don't. I think we're all waiting, frankly, with bated breath for what we hope will be some positive news about Helen's condition and her recovery. But we do know it's a serious condition. The hospital that she was medevaced to in Melbourne, the Alfred, one of the country's best, described Helen's condition as critical. We know it's going to be a difficult road for her and her family, but we are waiting for some positive news from the hospital, and ultimately, I think we'll receive some further reports from police, I expect.
 
MACDONALD: Can we talk about mental health services? Obviously, we don't know any of the specifics about this individual, but it’s been reported that this man has undergone a mental health assessment. I know there's been a lot of discussion about access to mental health, the need for that, particularly post-COVID. Is this something you're thinking about this morning?
 
BUTLER: I think we're always thinking about it. I obviously don't want to speculate about this particular case. I've heard some reports on background, but really, I don't want to speculate about this particular gentleman who's been taken into custody, who's the subject of a major police investigation, not just involving the Victorian Police but also the Federal Police and ASIO as well. This is a very, very serious investigation happening.
 
But in the broadest terms, I think, like pretty much every country around the world, all of us are facing a very significant increase in mental health issues in the community. And we're working really hard to try and make sure there's the right mix of services, that they're available in regional Australia as well as in our cities, and they're affordable. And that's certainly been a big part of what we've been doing over the last few years, doing things like opening Medicare Mental Health Centres, which are available for people, frankly, with more serious mental health issues but on a walk-in basis. They're free of charge. They don't require a formal referral. And later this afternoon, I'm just about to fly to Melbourne from Sydney, Hamish, to do some work with Patrick McGorry, a former Australian of the Year, who really is a world leader in youth mental health, because we know that the pressure on the mental health of young Australians, again, just like their peers around the world, just continues to climb.
 
MACDONALD: The Prime Minister's been repeating his calls for the broader public, for our politics, to turn the temperature down. A few people expressing some, I suppose, doubts about that call this morning because it's been repeated so often, it doesn't seem to be working. Do we need a different approach here? Is there a better approach? Is there more explicit language that can be used to try and draw the community back towards something more sensible, more respectful?
 
BUTLER: He's not the only one who's been calling for that as you know, Hamish. The head of ASIO, the head of the Federal Police, have also called out the need for a lowering of the temperature and called out the fact that political debate has changed over the last several years in this country, a country that used to pride itself on an open, tolerant, robust but tolerant, and respectful political debate about the direction of our country has changed over the last few years. There's much more hate. There's much more intolerance. When pretty much everyone involved in political debate has the best interests of our country at heart, I think all of us would like to go back to the traditional approach that Australia had, because it is colouring the nature of our debate.
 
And as the head of ASIO has said, that sense of hate and intolerance is the breeding ground for actual violence, and I think that, very sadly, is what we've seen over the last 24 hours. There’s been a huge increase in the number of threats of violence, and in many cases, death, against public figures over the last five years. A big increase in the need for Federal Police to get involved in protecting public figures, and I think that's a shame for our democracy more broadly. I was only speaking last night to some business figures from other countries who are constantly amazed at how accessible and open our political system is and that in their countries, including in Europe and North America, public figures, particularly ministers, are usually shielded behind cordons of armed security and armed police. And we don't want to go down that path. We should cherish and hang on to the open nature, the accessible nature, of our democracy. But the flip side of that is a need to get back to some more tolerance and some more respect in our political debate, and that applies right across the board.
 
MACDONALD: Mark Butler is the Federal Health Minister. You're fronting the media this morning about the uptake of 1800MEDICARE since it was launched at the beginning of the year. What are the indications? How is it tracking?
 
BUTLER: It's tracking very well, and this is another tool in the Medicare toolbox, frankly. I was just out at the Burwood Medicare Urgent Care Clinic with Sally Sitou, the Member for Reid in the Inner West. It's a relatively new Urgent Care Clinic, only opened at the end of last year, but it's already seen thousands and thousands of members of that community, free of charge, getting really high quality urgent care in their community, but also taking pressure off the hospital.
 
And at the same time, we launched 1800MEDICARE, which is a free, convenient phone line staffed by the sort of quality staff you'd expect by a service badged as an official Medicare service. And it means that people get that advice when they need it. Overnight and on the weekends, they can be referred for an immediate free GP telehealth consult, so over video. But again, of the more than a million people who've used that service in less than a year, almost 200,000 say that if it wasn't available to them, they'd have gone to the local hospital emergency department or called Triple Zero. So, again, taking much needed pressure off those busy emergency services.
 
MACDONALD: Obviously, you'll be aware that the State's Health Minister, Ryan Park, is apportioning quite a lot of the issues in the state's health system, in the health system here in Sydney, to the Commonwealth, including the pressure on our hospital beds, in part because of blockages in the aged care system, so much so that the state government has now funded interim aged care services. Here's Ryan Park when he spoke to us on this program about that decision.
 
[Excerpt]
 
RYAN PARK, NSW HEALTH MINISTER: I’m not happy that I have to step in. I don't think it's my responsibility to step in, but I've also got a responsibility of making sure that our health and hospital system is functioning. And when you're losing 1100 beds every morning, that's the equivalent of two Sydney hospitals, I think people would understand why I've needed to do this and take this action. But it's not a decision that we've taken lightly. It's taken some time for me to really see that we've tried everything else, and I think this is almost the last stance in terms of trying to get into this situation and trying to deal with it.
 
[End of excerpt]
 
MACDONALD: Do you accept that this is a failure on the part of the Commonwealth, that a state government's now having to step in and deliver this stuff?
 
BUTLER: Unfortunately, whether, frankly, state health ministers like it or not, all of us are having to put our shoulder to the wheel to deal with an unprecedented increase in demand for health and aged care services as the oldest baby boomers start to enter their 80s. You and I have talked about this before, Hamish. Those babies born in 1946 and ’47 -
 
MACDONALD: Sure. But you have access to all this demographic data as well. I mean, this could have been foreshadowed. It's not a surprise Australia has an ageing population.
 
BUTLER: It was foreshadowed. No, it was foreshadowed. Frankly, not enough was done about it in the last decade. But we all knew this was happening. We tried to set up a system 15 years ago that would be ready. Unfortunately, not enough happened in the past decade, and in the last four years, we've been, frankly, racing to catch up. When I became Health Minister four years ago or so, we spent $24 billion on aged care. This year, we'll spend $44 billion. We’ve tripled the number of packages of care that people receive at home. We're doing everything we can to get aged care facilities to build new beds. But we, I've tried to be honest, Hamish, with you and your listeners and others, we're struggling to keep up with the demand on the system. We've got to do more. And when we try to put new funds into aged care services, we encounter blockages like we did in the Parliament last week, where everyone says, you've got to build more aged care services, but when we try to free up the funds to do so by making some pretty difficult but sensible changes to the private health insurance rebate, suddenly, the Opposition, the Greens Party say, well, no, we're going to block that.
 
But we work constructively with the state health ministers. I saw Ryan Park yesterday, had a brief chat with him here in Sydney. But we shouldn't pretend that somehow state hospital systems are going be hermetically protected from what is a very vast demographic change. We are working as hard as we can to build the aged care services. We're putting record funding into the hospital systems, including here in New South Wales. And we're building new services to take that pressure off the front door, the emergency department.
 
MACDONALD: To be very clear, though, this doesn't sound like, we’re really sorry but we will fix things. This is, this is how it is.
 
BUTLER: No. We are doing everything we can to expand services as quickly as possible. But I think Ryan understands, and other health ministers understand, the raw numbers involved here are something this country has never dealt with before. And frankly, other countries are dealing with the ageing of the post-war baby booms as well and experiencing similar problems. But I’ve said clearly, this has got to be one of the highest priorities, not just of the Commonwealth government but of state governments as well, to recognise this isn't just a bit of a change, this is a step change in the demand for good quality health and aged care services that older Australians who built this country deserve.
 
Now, we'll continue to do what we can with finding every dollar available. We're trying to find every lever we can to get aged care facilities building new beds. But I recognise that the increase in demand is difficult to keep up with.
 
MACDONALD: Mark Butler, always appreciate your time. Thank you very much.
 
BUTLER: Thanks, Hamish.
 
MACDONALD: That's the Federal Health Minister, Mark Butler.