SALLY SARA, HOST: A new opinion poll published by the Financial Review shows One Nation overtaking Labor in the primary vote for the first time. It shows voters marking down the government for its Federal Budget, with only 11 per cent saying they believe it will be good for them personally. Mark Butler is the Minister for Health and Ageing, also Minister for Disability and the National Disability Insurance Scheme. He joined me a short time ago.
Minister, welcome back to Breakfast.
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: Thank you, Sally.
SARA: This polling also showed negative views of the budget among millennial and Gen Z voters, who were the main target of the budget. Has the government failed to land a message of hope on housing affordability?
BUTLER: Giving young people a fair crack at getting into the housing market was obviously one of the key features of the budget, but we recognise it was a hard budget, although we think it was necessary. And it was a complex budget, which is going to take some time for us to get out there and explain to the Australian population. I'm not greatly surprised, particularly at a time where we know households are under huge pressure, that the polls are showing that people are continuing to expect and frankly demand that the political system delivers more for their households, and we're out there doing that.
SARA: Were you expecting a better result from younger people who were targeted with some of these housing measures?
BUTLER: As I say, there's obviously a lot of debate around this budget. People who have a view that the status quo should have been maintained and we shouldn't have changed anything are pretty loud in this debate. So it is going to take us some time to break through that and explain exactly what the benefits of this budget are. But we recognise it's a hard budget. Reforming budgets are hard. They usually get this sort of response as the government takes the time to explain why these measures, which might seem hard at the time, are necessary to set the country up for a better future.
SARA: The rise of One Nation now seems to be coming also at the expense of Labor, not only the Coalition. Why do you think some Labor voters would be tempted to support One Nation?
BUTLER: I wouldn't read too much into the numbers. We're two years out from an election. There'll be a million polls between now and the election day, which will determine future government. But again, as I said earlier in our interview, Sally, I think we all understand that households are under enormous pressure right now. They have been for a period of time. I mean, we saw even before the war in Iran that our economy was pretty hot, building a lot of price pressures in the system, but that's been greatly aggravated by the impact of this war in Iran. I think you see that in the polls, you see it in private research. People are just wanting government to deliver more relief to the pressure that they feel on their households, on their housing budgets, on their expectation for fuel into the future, on healthcare costs and many other things like that. And I think we're doing a lot in all of those areas, but I expect that that sort of pressure is going to continue to come through the research.
SARA: There's fresh data today showing a modest decline in house prices in Sydney and Melbourne and flat nationally. Is that a good thing? Do you welcome this slowdown in house price growth?
BUTLER: I think it will take some time to just really see what's happening with the housing market. Obviously, there are a whole bunch of different drivers of house prices. Government budgets are just one of them, and I think it wouldn't be a surprise for people to take a pause and just really carefully examine what they think the impact of changes might be on them. I wouldn't look at a couple of weeks' data and try to discern a long-term trend from that. But what we are seeing, I think, anecdotally, is young people finding it easier to get into the auctions and find themselves able to bid a reasonable price and get into the housing market like generations of Australians have done before them.
SARA: Does the government want house prices to fall?
BUTLER: There are Treasury projections about that. The government doesn't have a view about where we'd like to see house prices and I think we're pretty reluctant to get in there and provide commentary on things like that. What we do want is for younger people to have a fairer crack at that. You've seen that in a range of different policies we've put in place. The 5 per cent deposits are making a big difference. I think the idea that young people looking for their first home aren't going to be bidding against investors who have the benefit of tax breaks behind their bidding is going to make things easier as well. That's certainly something unambiguously that we've wanted to see from our housing policy.
SARA: On Radio National Breakfast, I'm speaking with the Federal Minister for Health and Ageing, Mark Butler. Let's turn to your portfolio now. Are you confident the Coalition will support the government's bill to reform the NDIS? Given that you want to start implementing these changes quickly, what impact would a three-month delay in passing the legislation have on the budget?
BUTLER: We haven't costed a three-month delay. We know that from documents we've provided to the Senate that a 12-month delay would impact the budget by about $17 billion. So you can do some maths around that and get figures at shorter periods. We want to make changes pretty much immediately to deal particularly with the cost blowouts that I've talked to you about before that we've seen since only December. But I've been really pleased with the constructive way in which we've been able to engage the Opposition. Angus Taylor made a big point in his budget reply of recognising the need to cooperate with government on NDIS reform. Melissa McIntosh, my Shadow Minister, has been very constructive. But obviously there's a Senate inquiry underway and they want to look through the detail of the legislation, read the submissions, listen to the public submissions that are happening at the hearings. So I don't take things for granted, but I think the approach the Opposition has made so far has been a very constructive one.
SARA: If we're looking at aged care, you've released new data showing the number of older Australians waiting for in-home care has fallen, but there are still more than 100,000 people on the waiting list. Can the government meet that level of demand?
BUTLER: We’ve put more packages into the system than has ever happened before. It’s a 25 per cent increase in package numbers in one single year. I mean, that's a huge injection of new supply. And we have seen tens of thousands of more people get packages. We've seen the wait times at every level come down, which is a pleasing thing. But as you and I have talked about a number of times before, Sally, there's also an historic increase in demand as a particular generation comes into the aged care system. So satisfying all of that demand is going to be a very difficult job for government. We don't have any higher priority than a good aged care system. But the fact that at a time when demand is growing faster than it ever has in our country's history, we've seen wait times come down at every single level is incredibly pleasing to me.
SARA: Just finally, you've also announced this morning that two leukaemia treatments will get expanded access under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. How many people are expected to access those treatments?
BUTLER: Well, many hundreds. There are two of them, as you say. And blood cancer, I don't think it's often recognised, is the second biggest killer of all cancer types in the country. So being able to bring two new products onto the market for blood cancers in the same month is a great new hope to many hundreds of Australians who are battling this really difficult cancer type. So different types of leukaemia, a particular type of lymphoma, will have new medicines available from today. One of them, Blincyto, which is immunotherapy for a type of leukaemia, would cost people $230,000 if it weren't on the PBS. About 110 people will get that every year. The other one, Calquence, again, thousands of dollars per script, now $25 a script for as many as 1200 patients who are dealing with particular types of leukaemia and lymphoma. And this really is the magic of the PBS, Sally, finding these medicines across the world, bringing them to Australia and making them available to Australian patients at $25 a script or even $7 if they're on concession card.
SARA: Minister, thank you so much for joining me this morning.
BUTLER: Thanks, Sally.