Radio interview with Minister Butler, ABC Radio Adelaide – 17 July 2025

JO LAVERTY, HOST: I would like to say a big welcome to Mark Butler, who is the Federal Minister for Health, Ageing, Disability and the NDIS, the first federal minister that we're going to be able to ask about the toxic algal bloom in South Australia. A range of other very issues as well. Minister, thank you for joining me.
 
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: My pleasure, Jo.
 
LAVERTY: We've got some good news about vaping as well, which we're going to touch on. So we've got quite a bit to get through. But you have been an MP in the western suburbs and the Port since 2007, so for a long, time, and your office is just metres away from the Port River. So this has been on your radar for some time, hasn't it?
 
BUTLER: Yeah, sure, it has. I have the great privilege of representing the coastal strip from Outer Harbor, so the tip of the Lefevre Peninsula, right up essentially to the end of West Beach, so West Beach, Glenelg North. A lot of beach communities, a lot of very active beach environment communities. A lot of constituencies spend a lot of their time, even in winter, walking along the beach, and they've been talking to me about this.
 
Obviously, I’ve been talking to my colleague Susan Close, the Acting Premier, but also the Minister for the Environment about this as well. And my own experience, I was walking on the beach between Grange and Henley jetties over the weekend and came across what looked like a small dead shark, a couple of dead rays, a number of dead fish, a lot of dead cuttlefish, scenes I've never seen before in all of my many, many years of walking along Adelaide's beaches. Like every South Australian, I'm really worried about what's happening. Deeply, deeply worried. As I said to some of your colleagues yesterday when I was doing media here in Adelaide, very committed to making sure that we're talking about this over the next fortnight when we return to Canberra.
 
LAVERTY: Have you been talking, it's been going for months now, have you already been talking to some of your counterparts in Canberra? Do they even know what's happening? Because there's a sense, and I'm sure you're picking this up yourself, Minister, there's a sense that the rest of the country doesn't even know what's going on here.
 
BUTLER: Yeah, I think there is that sense that I picked up in our community, that people are concerned that it's not really resonating east, particularly in the eastern states. And to the extent that's right. I think me and my colleagues want to make sure that changes, that people are aware of what's happening here. I think it's also important, though, to point out that I've been talking to people here in Adelaide about this. This is pretty new, not just to South Australia but the scale of this outbreak, of this particular form of algae, Karenia mikimotoi. The scale of it is something we've not seen in Australia before. We've seen it in other parts of the world. We've seen smaller outbreaks of this algae type here in South Australia and elsewhere. But the sheer scale of it, because of the confluence of some significant environmental factors, is something that none of us have really seen before.
 
Everyone is really coming to grips with what is happening. It's certainly why we have sent, at the Commonwealth level, sent the head of our Oceans Division of the Department of the Environment down to Adelaide this week. They are here now. I think they might actually be out on the vessel that Susan Close has sent out to the Gulf and into the Southern Ocean over the coming several days to try and get a better sense of what is happening out there.
 
I do want to reinforce this is quite new and I think even people very expert in marine science are coming to grips with the scale, the uniqueness of this extreme event because it is an extreme event. But I do also want to make sure that I, and I'm sure Amanda Rishworth, who represents a whole lot of coastal communities further down south, and our Senate Cabinet colleagues, Don Farrell and Penny Wong, will be wanting to talk about this. I've already had a number of talks with the Environment Minister, Murray Watt, about this as well.
 
LAVERTY: One of your Senate counterparts, Sarah Hanson-Young, has been talking about this for a long time, saying that if this was in Sydney, then everybody would know it. And you're right, the head of International Environment Reef and Ocean Division is in Adelaide now. But this statement from Murray Watt, who we've been trying for some time to have a conversation with as well, who is the Federal Environment Minister, says it follows a meeting of senior officials from both level of governments just yesterday. So this conversation just yesterday is the reason that the head of Reef and Ocean Division has finally come to South Australia. This seems, like, just so late in the piece, Minister.
 
BUTLER: There have been conversations, as I understand it, happening before then, obviously. This very senior official coming to Adelaide, I think, is an indication that the Commonwealth wants to understand what is an extreme event but also quite a new event for Australia. Murray Watt, I think, also in his statement, said that the Commonwealth was keen to make sure that we would give careful consideration to any request for further assistance from the state, and also very much keen on supporting the efforts that South Australia is already putting in place.
 
LAVERTY: Will you be asking for more support from Murray Watt?
 
BUTLER: I want to make sure that we're deeply engaged in this. I made the point yesterday, and I say again, this is quite a unique event, whether it happened on New South Wales coast or on the Queensland coast or in the South Australian coast, I think the state government involved and the Commonwealth would be really working hard to get a sense of what this means for coastal communities, for the fishing industry, for the environment more broadly, and what a response to something we've not really dealt with in this scale before should be.
 
LAVERTY: Well, we already know that business and industry are seriously adversely affected. Businesses are going under. We've heard of one local oyster producer who can't sell their local oysters anymore, so they're having to import oysters just to remain in the oyster business. So whilst we can see that there's probably not much you can do to stop the algal bloom, but there is industry and people and families who are really hurting. Will you be asking Murray Watt for some support for those people?
 
BUTLER: It's really a matter for South Australia to make those requests. And as Murray has said, it's not really just Murray Watt's portfolio responsibility here. It's the Commonwealth more broadly. If there are requests for assistance, of course, the Commonwealth would give that careful consideration.
 
LAVERTY: And has there been requests for assistance so far, Minister?
 
BUTLER: I'm not aware. I've not been involved in those conversations directly. I'm the Health Minister, so in that sense, it's not really part of my responsibility. My responsibility here is the local member, and as a South Australian to make sure that what is happening here in South Australia is heard and understood in Canberra. As I've said, I'm really committed to doing that. I've been trying to do that over the past, and we've got an opportunity, as Parliament gets back together over the next couple of weeks, to have those discussions as well. But what that request for assistance looks like, I think, will develop over time. This is obviously an extreme event, but it's not an event like a single-point-in-time cyclone which smashes into a particular town and you've got to get in immediately and put things back together. This is more like a drought, really, where, as you say, you can't make it rain. You can't fix this, what is happening in the ocean, not that I understand, at least. But you do have to monitor what the impact is on communities, on relevant industries, and make sure government is supporting people through that. But that doesn't become clear in 24 hours as it does in a cyclone. This is an unfolding event that's been unfolding over months. It's important that governments work closely together to monitor this as it continues, I fear, to unfold even further.
 
LAVERTY: You've already said you're in regular contact with Susan Close, who's our own Environment Minister, and so I can only assume you would know if some kind of request had been made. And also, given that they've only just had this conversation yesterday between state and federal government, which has led to the head of the Reef and Ocean Division coming to Adelaide today, I think it's fair to say that that has not been made so far. Have you spoken to the Prime Minister about it? What are Anthony Albanese's view?
 
BUTLER: No, I haven't. As your listeners know, particularly as this conversation has intensified over the last several days, the Prime Minister's been overseas. But as I said, everyone's back together in Canberra next week.
 
LAVERTY: The last couple of days? Oh my gosh, you're not serious, are you? It's been intensifying for so much longer than that.
 
BUTLER: No. It has been for a considerable period of time. I've not had a discussion with the Prime Minister really for quite some time about anything.
 
LAVERTY: Let's move on to health, and our State Health Minister, Chris Picton, was on this program Wednesday last week and said how aged care is severely impacting the hospital system.
 
[Excerpt]
 
CHRIS PICTON, SA HEALTH MINISTER: We're obviously facing barriers of getting people out of hospital into aged care. We've got over 260 people stuck in hospital who don't need to be there. That takes up beds from people who otherwise need to come in and use those beds.
 
[End of excerpt]
 
LAVERTY: So we know ramping's been a problem in South Australia. Now the Nurses' Union is saying that corridor ramping is becoming increasingly a problem. You are the Aged Care Minister, and part of the complex dynamics within health is that we've got aged care people who would love to not be in hospital. They'd love to not be there, but there's nowhere else for them to go. So what is being done to make sure those people who require aged care are in the right setting, which is not the hospital?
 
BUTLER: The first point I make is that not every one of those 260 older people who are in hospitals clinically able to be discharged would necessarily be going into an aged care facility. I don't quite know what the number is. I'm not sure whether the state does or any state for that matter, because this is an issue right across the country, I have to say. It is undoubtedly true that there are bottlenecks between the hospital and the aged care system, and that's really because as I said yesterday, when I was with Chris Picton doing a media conference including about this, that's really because our aged care facilities are pretty much all full. There has not been the investment that we needed over the last several years to expand the aged care sector in the way I think anyone who understands what is happening to our community would expect. We are an ageing population. Particularly, the older end of the baby boomer generation is starting to reach aged care age, and we just don't have enough aged care facilities for them. That's why we worked so hard in our last term of Parliament to put through new legislation to cram into three years what should have been a decade of reform to make this sector more investable. The aged care operators were telling us that the policy settings simply meant they could not get finance to build new beds. Now, we changed that. We put legislation through the Parliament with the support, I must say, of the Opposition, including particularly Anne Ruston as the Shadow Minister, right before Christmas in a way that I think will see much more investment in the aged care sector. But as I admitted yesterday, that's not going to see aged care facilities open tomorrow. This happened five years ago, frankly. It’s only happening now -
 
LAVERTY: As you say, it's not just about aged care systems, the aged care homes. We hear so often here at the ABC about the Home Care Packages so, once you leave hospital, how can you live well at home? But waiting for the approvals and for all the things that come with an aged care home is laborious. So what's being done to make that faster and easier for people who need a Home Care Package?
 
BUTLER: We've been expanding the number of packages every budget that we've had and most of them in mid-year budget reviews as well, so there's constant expansion of those packages. One of the challenges we found when we came to government a few years ago was it was all well and good to expand the number of packages, but we were having trouble getting the staff to actually deliver them. Lifting their wages, which we did over the past few years, has been important to ensure that organisations are actually able to attract the staff they need to deliver the packages that we're funding them to deliver.
 
But again, I just make the point, the number of packages has to expand very, very quickly, very significantly to meet the demand we're getting from simply the numbers of older people in the population as the community ages. Part of that Aged Care Act that we put through the Parliament last year not only makes the residential sector, so aged care homes, much more investable so we will see more building happen finally, but also introduces a very significant new program for Support at Home. It means there'll be a lot more packages. They'll be much better packages. They'll include things like support for assistive technology at home. Finally, they will include things like people being able to receive palliative care at home funded by our system, which frankly has been a gap in our system for far too long. But again, we've had to cram that work into a relatively short period of time because nothing was done for a decade.
 
LAVERTY: I've got a call for you. Hannah's from Yankalilla. Go ahead, Hannah.
 
HANNAH, CALLER: Good morning. Yes, Minister, you say the Support at Home is going to improve things, but there are so many holes in it. There's so much confusion. You've put a $15,000 cap on home modifications. This is going to mean that people, and that's a lifetime cap, people will not be able to have a bathroom renovation. They won't be able to have ramps, which means they won't be able to stay in their own homes. They'll be forced to go into residential care. How is that going to help the situation? And people will have falls. I've got a friend who can't get a renovation now, and they've already had two falls. How does that help the system?
 
Also, co-payments. People on full pensions are going to have to pay up to 17.5 per cent for shopping, cleaning, gardening. A pensioner just cannot afford it. Somebody with high needs is going to be hundreds of dollars out of pocket.
 
LAVERTY: Thank you, Hannah. Hannah in Yankalilla raises a few issues there. The $15,000 cap, I think, is a very good one. You probably wouldn't even get your doors widened for your wheelchairs and ramps in out of the place for $15,000. Is that fair, do you think?
 
BUTLER: I'm just not sure I agree with that. I noted all of those points that Hannah made down, and I'll go back and have a look at them. But we worked very hard, consulted very carefully with the sector, with older people and their representative organisations as well as providers when we set these new details in place. We think they get the balance right. Hannah is right that we will be asking people to make a contribution to their aged care where they have the ability to do so. But it also depends on what type of care they're getting. If they're getting clinical care, in keeping with the Medicare principles, the government will pay for all of that. But if they are receiving services which people generally have to pay for anyway, so gardening, cleaning their house, those sorts of things, then we are asking for a modest contribution. But I make the point that the vast bulk of costs of the aged care system will continue to be paid for by taxpayers.
 
LAVERTY: That's interesting about the palliative care at home information. We might get a little bit more about that from you a little later. But there is also- at the beginning of this month, there was meant to be new legislation around aged care and a report coming out, I think that's been pushed back to the latter part of the year. What are we going to see in that?
 
BUTLER: All of the things I've been talking about are being passed through the Parliament in December; new arrangements for funding aged care facilities, the new Support at Home program. We were hoping we'd be able to put in place on 1 July, because we know people have been waiting for these things for a long time. But we had the election, we had a range of other things, frankly, just made that unrealistic. The sector, whether that's representatives of older people and also aged care providers, said that was too short a timeframe. They wanted a short delay. Instead, these new arrangements will take effect in November rather than this month in July.
 
LAVERTY: We have seen in South Australia flu cases skyrocketing, which is definitely adding to the pressure being experienced in the healthcare system and hospitals. So last year, there were nearly 9,000 cases. This year, it’s nearly 14,500 cases, so that's an increase in 5,000 cases. Is there some merit to the idea of making flu vaccines free?
 
BUTLER: Flu vaccines are free for over 65s and for under five-year-olds. And they are the cohorts of the population that our medicines experts have said should be covered by what is called the National Immunisation Program. That's the program that gives out free vaccines, whether it's the childhood vaccinations, things like flu vax, the new vaccines we've put on the program for older people, for shingles, all those sorts of things. The -
 
LAVERTY: Should the vaccination be free for everyone?
 
BUTLER: I'm making the point that our vaccine program which delivers free vaccines, is determined by medicines experts. Now, pretty frequently they've had a look at whether or not the flu vax should be provided or covered by that program, so paid for by taxpayers for otherwise healthy adults and children between the ages of five and 64. I’ve said that there's not a case for that. Now, under legislation, I can only list a vaccine on that program that is recommended to me by that group of medicines experts. It's not a political decision, it is a decision guided by the science, and that's been the case for decades and decades. It's the case for the PBS, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme for medicines, and it's also the case for vaccines. I know that that group continues to look at those key respiratory diseases, the flu, COVID, RSV particularly, on an ongoing basis. As new clinical data, as new evidence emerges, if they feel the need to change their advice, they will. But at the moment, they haven't.
 
LAVERTY: And just finally, some good news. There’s been a -
 
BUTLER: Just to make the point, Jo, I don't think you'll find many hospitalisations of otherwise healthy children, teenagers and adults under the age of 65. If there's a level of immunocompromised that might expose you to more serious complications from flu, then you would be covered. But really, hospitalisations for severe risk around flu is for older people and for kids under five.
 
LAVERTY: Okay, so obviously hospitals are full with other reasons.
 
BUTLER: That's right. Winter is a really difficult time for hospital systems right across the world, including here in Australia, and respiratory disease is a key driver of that, which is why we encourage people who are covered by these vaccination programs, whether it's flu or COVID or RSV, to get those vaccines. They do protect you, particularly against the risk of the sort of severe disease that might lead you into hospital. That's good for you, but it's also good for the system.
 
LAVERTY: But it does block up the emergency department. Maybe they're not hospitalised, but if people go in with flu. Let's move on from that. We only have a few minutes left and I do want to talk about this good news with vaping. You've hit a milestone.
 
BUTLER: We hit a milestone of seizing 10 million of the awful things at the border. Remember these were presented as great therapeutic devices that would help middle-aged, long-term smokers finally kick the habit. What we found though was actually they were pink, they were bright colours, they had unicorns on them and they had flavours like bubble gum but were clearly targeted at kids. This was a cynical device from Big Tobacco to try and recruit a new generation to nicotine addiction right across the world, not just here in Australia, and tragically it was working. The rates of vaping among kids and teenagers was simply exploding when we came to government.
 
We banned the import of these products and we've seized 10 million of them already. They're harder to get, they're much more expensive where you can get them. But we know also we've got a lot more to do. The evidence is showing that vaping rates, which have been increasing year on year at startling levels, have finally started to come down. Right across the country, we've seen now a number of pieces of research. The reductions in vaping rates have been most significant here in South Australia. Research from SAHMRI, the South Australian Medical Health Research Institute shows, and that's because the South Australian government, without any shadow of a doubt, has led the way on enforcement. The enforcement powers that Andrea Michaels is able to deploy, that she was given by Parliament, lead the country and are the reason why the really hard fight we're having right now against organised crime on illicit tobacco and on vaping is being waged far more effectively here in South Australia than any other part of the country.
 
LAVERTY: There was also a decrease in young people vaping, but there were other figures saying an increase in young people taking up the regular cigarettes again?
 
BUTLER: They were tracking different populations. There was one piece of research looking at young adults. The research we looked at yesterday was kids under 18. That our major focus of the reforms, and that research has consistently showed that since our reforms came into effect, fewer younger people are vaping, but also fewer younger people are smoking. That's the really pleasing thing, because there was a lot of conjecture that maybe if you clamp down on vapes, kids would move to cigarettes. And by kids, I mean really under 18-year-olds.
 
LAVERTY: Young people, yeah. Mark Butler, I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much for being so generous with it today. Federal Minister for Health, Ageing, Disability and NDIS.