Radio interview with Minister Butler, FIVEaa Breakfast - 23 April 2026

WILL GOODINGS, HOST: We do have the Federal Health Minister Mark Butler on the line right now. Minister, good morning to you.
 
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: Good morning, guys.
 
DAVID PENBERTHY, HOST: So Mark Butler, 160,000 people need to be removed from the NDIS. Would it be fair to say that they would fall under a category of having more minor needs than others who are on it, but if that’s the case, isn’t the key question here is: what are minor needs?
 
BUTLER: And really, that is the question we have to answer over the coming months as we design this assessment scheme. Really, you need to go back to the original intent of the scheme. We set this scheme up in the first place to support people with significant and permanent disability, but what we’ve seen over those years is the scope of it go much broader than that. People certainly with disability, certainly who have support needs, but at a more mild to more moderate level have gone onto a scheme that was never designed for them. I’ve already talked about this for kids under the age of nine, setting up our Thriving Kids program so that there is another support system for parents, obviously, to access.
 
But I’ve been very clear. We need to get the NDIS back to its original purpose, so serving and supporting those people with significant and permanent disability. Now, working out where the line is the job of work we now have over coming months, working with the disability community, getting technical advice, and engaging with state and territory governments who obviously have a lot of skin in the game in this as well.
 
But I just think it’s really, really critical to be clear with your listeners and with other Australians, this scheme’s at real risk. It’s growing out of control. Its community support is slipping away very, very fast because people think it’s got away from us, it’s costing too much, it’s riddled with rorts and dodgy providers, and it’s got to have a major reset.
 
GOODINGS: So, one of the changes you spoke about yesterday would be a functional change about the entry point to the NDIS where you would use, to quote you, standardised evidence-based assessments of a personal functional capacity, not an official diagnosis. So what's an example of how that would change in practice?
 
BUTLER: See, what we've seen over the last 13 years is basically the use of diagnosis lists. If you're able to find a specialist, whether it's a paediatrician or a psychiatrist or someone, pay probably a couple of thousand dollars to get a diagnosis, then you're automatically enrolled into the scheme. That was never the intent. The intent was to look at a person's functional capacity. If they have significant support needs because of their functional capacity with a significant and permanent disability, that's the population that we had in mind when we were designing the scheme. Those diagnosis lists, the diagnosis gateway that people complained to me about all the time because it's hard to get into the specialist, you might be waiting for years, you have to pay thousands of dollars, that was always intended to be used while we got the scheme up and running on the basis that we'd always transfer to some more objective scientific assessment system that meant that everyone got tested through the same tool rather than, could I find a psychiatrist or a paediatrician or not?
 
PENBERTHY: Yeah. Just in terms of how that will actually all be worked out though, Mark Butler, like to Will's point earlier, you're going to have to run this sort of gamut of every single sort of parents' group saying, well, my child has already been getting this help, now they're not going to get any. You're sort of unscrambling the omelette is going to be the really hard part, is it not? Because even if some of these schemes might be a bit sort of unnecessary or, you know, there may be concerns about the people providing them doing it for financial gain, there's still services that kids are currently using, whether they're of value or not. So you're going to have to walk through all of that, aren't you?
 
BUTLER: It's going to be hard, Dave, I tried to be honest about that yesterday. Change, particularly significant change, is always difficult and it's going to be confronting. I understand that for parents and for adults with disability themselves as we work through that change. And I wish I didn't have to say that change is important, but the truth is it is. If we don't get this scheme working the way it was originally intended to, if we don't get the costs under control, then I really worry about the future of the scheme, the sustainability of the scheme well into the future and the support that it has given to transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of Australians.
 
We need to make sure that we can look Australians in the eye, including parents, and say there will be other support systems in place that, frankly, are much more appropriate for your needs than the NDIS. It has a whole lot of features to this scheme that really are built around the idea of significant and permanent disability, which is usually lifelong. That's often not what parents need for kids who have more mild to moderate needs. They need supports that are situated in their community that they can access in places where they live and learn and play, connecting with other parents who are going through the same things rather than this highly individualised, frankly, let-it-rip market that the NDIS has established.
 
PENBERTHY: How do we make sure that as a country, like obviously more needs to be done to rein in debt, to make sure that we don't keep spending beyond our means. So it's a noble goal, trying to reduce the annual spend on the NDIS by so much. But how do we make sure that when you offer that reassurance that there's going to be services that are still provided by the states, that the states don't end up having to shell out billions and billions of extra money to pick up the slack through the withdrawal of federal services?
 
BUTLER: When you say federal services, the NDIS is a scheme that we run together with states and they contribute money to it. I can't make change without getting the agreement of states, including the South Australian government. It's a joint scheme, the NDIS, and in the same way, those support systems outside of the scheme for people who might end up not being on the scheme, we've already together allocated $6 billion way back in 2023 through a National Cabinet meeting that we had with all of the premiers, including Premier Malinauskas. Billions of dollars were allocated together, we'll pay 50 per cent, the other states and territories will pay together the other 50 per cent to rebuild those systems of support that used to exist before the NDIS, but too often now have been dismantled.
 
We're doing that already with Thriving Kids, for kids under the age of nine. We've got $4 billion going into that, $2 billion from the Commonwealth, $2 billion collectively from the other jurisdictions. And we'll have to do the same for other cohorts in the community as well. But I think governments have recognised that for some years. They first recognised it in 2023 and we've put money aside for that purpose.
 
PENBERTHY: Mark Butler, the Federal Minister for the NDIS. Thank you for joining us this morning.