TV interview with Minister Butler, Sunday Agenda - 1 February 2026

ANDREW CLENNELL, HOST: Alright, joining me live from Adelaide, the Health Minister, Mark Butler. Thanks so much for your time, Mark Butler. Also, the Senior Minister in charge of the NDIS.
 
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: Morning, Andrew.
 
CLENNELL: So you’ve landed this deal with the states, what does it mean in terms of budget savings on the NDIS? Are you able to make actual budget savings in the next five years on this, or does a lot of that extra money go to the states for hospitals, effectively, and for thriving kids?
 
BUTLER: Well, there is extra money for hospitals. It provides state hospital systems, all of those hardworking doctors and nurses and health professionals with certainty for five years. We know hospital systems are under pressure here in Australia, frankly, right around the world, there's still a bit of a legacy of COVID, but also we're all dealing with ageing populations, which means more pressure on our healthcare system more broadly. But when we came to Government a few years ago, the NDIS was growing at 22 per cent per year, really putting an unbearable strain on the budget, starting to crowd out a whole range of other things, not just in budgetary terms, but in terms of a drain on the workforce and the social care system. We got to a position where we worked out in some parts of the country, one in four junior primary school boys were on a scheme that was designed for significant and permanent disability. So for a couple of years now, there's been good work going on between governments to get that growth rate down to eight per cent. That was the commitment that state governments made to help us with back in 2023. And on Friday, they made a further commitment, reflecting the Press Club speech that I gave last year, to get that growth rate down even further to five, to six percent over coming years and that will really provide significant savings to the budget but also get a scheme back to frankly where it should be.
 
CLENNELL: How much? I mean if we take the 25 billion and let's say we take that out of the NDIS savings, how much is being saved over five years from the budget by thriving kids, et cetera, do you think?
 
BUTLER: That will become clearer as we move through our own budgetary process. We'll have more to say about that in due course. Obviously, that depends upon the timeframe it takes to get to.
 
CLENNELL: Do you know?
 
BUTLER: We haven't made budgetary decisions about that yet. We will do that over the future, but we needed that support from state governments. At the end of the day, the NDIS is not a Commonwealth program. It is a program delivered in partnership with states. We can't change the rules of the NDIS without support from state governments. State governments provide funding to the NDIS. They provide contributions, which they've agreed to increase as a result of the agreement on Friday. This is something we needed to get an in-principle agreement from state governments for, and we'll now go about the process of working through our own budgetary process and those savings will become clear. And obviously, we’ll have to go through a process.
 
CLENNELL:  No argument you needed to do it, Mr Butler, but I'm just a bit surprised that you come on this morning and you can't tell me when this is builders, look, we're really cutting back on the NDIS we're going to save money here, but we've given them 25 billion for hospitals, that you can't tell me, we're going to save, I don't know? 10 billion a year out of this or 20 billion over five, or some sort of figure. You have to wait for the budget before you can tell us that as the Health Minister and the Senior Minister in charge of NDIS?
 
BUTLER: Well, I'm surprised you'd expect me to outline what is clearly a budget process. This is a very big program for the Commonwealth. We've got to go through a budget process to work out the timeframe for getting growth rates down. We've got to go through a process with the disability community to co-design the changes that will deliver those savings. I'm surprised you think that after an in-principle agreement on Friday from the National Cabinet over the weekend, by Sunday morning, I've worked out that timeframe, what rule changes will be put in place. This is an incredibly complex piece of work for us. That's why the former government had let it get to 22 per cent. If you just let this thing go, a demand driven program like the NDIS the way in which it is designed, it will get off the tracks. And it is a program that's got off the tracks. Now, we've got that growth rate down to where we'd intended to get it, down towards eight per cent, but we know we need to get it down further. That's not going to be easy. It's going to be a hard piece of work over a period of time, obviously in partnership with the disability community as well as with states. And that's a core design element of this program that we do nothing about the disability community without the disability community.
 
CLENNELL: It was put to me yesterday, and I heard you say one in four before, but it was put to me yesterday there are classes, school classes, where four out of ten kids are on the NDIS in some circumstances. Is that the case?
 
BUTLER: I haven't heard that figure. I know that one in six boys between the age of five and seven, so your junior primary boys, one in six of them are on the NDIS. In some parts of the country, it's as high as one in four. Obviously, that was not the intention when governments and the disability community came together to put together what is really a world-leading reform we should all be proud of. We can't have that number of young boys, I mean there are significant numbers of young girls, but it is much higher for boys on a scheme designed for permanent and significant disability. We don't know what that means for their longer term trajectory. We know it's interrupting their ability to engage in learning activities at schools. We know schools are inundated with therapists coming to their front gate wanting to do one-on-one therapy with their clients as well. I think generally there's a recognition that this has, frankly, got out of control a bit. We've had an advisory group working with me and a very esteemed paediatrician, Frank Oberkleid, over the last six months to put together the model of Thriving Kids. There's been terrific buy in on that. There's been a parliamentary inquiry that was essentially co-chaired by Mike Freelander and Monique Ryan, both very experienced paediatricians themselves. That's delivered a report that the existing arrangements where you did see that many kids on the NDIS frankly were not working. Of course there will be a number of young kids with permanent significant disability on the NDIS. That's what the scheme was designed for. But children with more mild to moderate support needs should be on a broad-based, easy-to-access, largely free-of-charge program that doesn't require their parents to wait for ages to get a diagnosis they've probably had to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for.
 
CLENNELL: You've got a guarantee from the states as part of this deal they'll increase their NDIS contributions from 2028. How integral was this to the deal?
 
BUTLER: This was really important from our point of view. Obviously, they want Commonwealth contributing to the operation of their hospitals, as we always have. That's always been capped to ensure we have some fiscal protection ourselves. But the contributions to the NDIS growth was always capped from states as well at a relatively low level of four per cent. So while the scheme was growing at 22 per cent, states were only contributing four per cent growth to that and the Commonwealth taxpayers was bearing the vast bulk of the brunt of that. That's why now we fund about three quarters of a scheme that was originally intended to be 50-50 between the Commonwealth and the states. So the states agreeing to lift their escalation rates or their contribution to NDIS growth was important to ensure not only that the Commonwealth gets some support for that, but also to ensure that the states recognise they've got skin in the game as well to get these growth rates down. Not only because they obviously cherish a scheme that they helped co-design, but they're now on the hook in budgetary terms as well if we're not able to get these growth rates down to a more sustainable, responsible position.
 
CLENNELL: People have got past the election and you designed a lot of the policy for the election. Let's face it, you get some credit for the election result. But a lot of patients at GPs' surgeries would be of the view they're not suddenly being magically bulk billed. When will more Australians be getting free doctor's visits?
 
BUTLER: They already are. When we introduced the new figures of the new support on 1st November, there were about 2,000 general practises across the country that bulk billed all of their patients. That's increased by 1,300 already, and that number is increasing every single day. So there are 1,300 general practises, surgeries, that back in October were charging people gap fees, are now bulk billing all of their patients all of the time. If anything, that's exceeded my expectations the first few months of our bulk billing program We've already, since 1st November, delivered millions of additional free visits to the doctor. I'm talking to GPs who do bulk bill all their patients, who are inundated by patients moving from practises that don't bulk bill to their practise because they know that they can get good quality medical care free of charge. And that's on top of the Medicare urgent care clinics we're continuing to open. We opened our 120th urgent care clinic last week, all bulk billed, 2.5 million people have gone through them, not just getting high quality care but again taking pressure off our very crowded emergency department.
 
CLENNELL: Sure. How many GP surgeries in Australia, incidentally?
 
BUTLER: We've got, as I said, over 3,300 general practises now bulk bill every single one of their patients. That's out of around 7,000 practises. So we've gone from about a quarter of practises bulk billing everyone, getting up close to half.  We're well on the way to the commitment we gave to the Australian people of a bulk billing rate of 90 per cent by the end of this decade.
There’s till got a long way to go. I want to continue particularly to push some of those markets that are stubborn, like Canberra, like the Hunter Valley in Newcastle, but we're seeing good, pleasing results early on.
 
CLENNELL: This hospital deal puts more pressure on the budget. The GPs promise puts more pressure on the budget. You've got inflation up. You've got a rate hike coming. You're going to have to deliver a tighter budget than normal in May, aren't you?
 
BUTLER: We've been very responsible about finding savings, not just in every budget, but in our budget updates, including our December mid-year budget review, where we delivered another $20 billion in savings. Last year, we saw public demand. The pressure that public spending is placing on the economy reducing over the course of last year, making more room for the private economy, but yes, we have a very well-functioning economy right now. We've got very low unemployment. We've got good, strong economic growth. We've got real wages going up for the last couple of years after they were going down under the former government. So there are, as Jim Chalmers has said, some ongoing price pressures in the economy, particularly in areas like housing. But also those inflation figures you were talking about did see some one-off impacts of things like the state government energy rebates coming to an end. We're focused very much on this challenge, as we have been since we came to government in 2022 and inherited an inflation rate that was north of six per cent, delivering responsible savings, but also making sure we're delivering cost-of-living relief. The things that I've been rolling out as Health Minister, like cheaper medicines, like more free visits to the doctor, are starting to place downward pressure on inflation. Medicines are cheaper now than they were, while also making sure that households are helped with their cost of living.
 
CLENNELL: What's your message to Australians if they cop a rate hike on Tuesday about when the inflation dragon will be tamed, given Jim Chalmers told us a year ago it had been?
 
BUTLER: I'm not going to speculate about whether there might or might not be an interest rate rise, but I think we would say what we've been saying since we were first elected, that we know inflation is a very significant threat to the economy, but also a real pressure on households and small businesses, and that's why we've been so focused on it. Jim Chalmers has also been clear,  right through this very difficult period for the whole global economy around prices, that inflation doesn't move in a nice, neat, linear way. I mean, it does zig and it zags. We encounter price pressures in the global economy and then in our own economy that mean we've constantly got to be focused on this. I know as a member of the Expenditure Review Committee, we were focused on it as we developed the mid-year budget review with those savings of $20 billion, and we'll be very focused on it as we start the work very soon to prepare the May Budget as well.
 
CLENNELL: Alright, you're announcing today, as I understand it, a new PBS listing for a drug to deal with prostate cancer. Take us briefly through that.
 
BUTLER: This is almost the 400th new listing or expanded listing on the PBS we've delivered, making sure that people get access to the world's best treatments at affordable prices. We know prostate cancer is a real pressure on men in Australia. It's the most common cancer for men, the most common cancer diagnosed generally in the country and still takes about 4,000 men's lives every single year in spite of really good survival rates. This drug we're listing today, Andriga-10, provides support for men with quite serious prostate cancer, metastatic cancer that is resistant to castration, whether that's surgical castration or chemical castration, and provides relief in two ways, not just by battling the hormones that drive cancer growth, but also providing really significant support in terms of the symptoms and the side effects of this really difficult cancer. So instead of paying maybe $900 a script from today, the 1st of February, those 2,000 or more Australian men will get this drug at just $25 a script, which is the same price back in 2004 medicines were, or if they're on a concession card as low as $7.
 
CLENNELL: Alright, I wanted to raise with you this case of Rosalia Schickverg, this Bondi shooting victim who Sky revealed last week had her name changed without her permission to Karen Jones after the shooting at Liverpool Hospital. The New South Wales Government has apologised to her for the way this has been handled. What's your own view of the case and the way pseudonyms should be handled in such circumstances?
 
BUTLER: I did read this case and credit to Sky for reporting it. I had a good read of it. I haven't spoken to the New South Wales Health Minister. I'm seeing him over the next couple of weeks. But I've read a report that he intends to meet with this patient and talk through her experience and see whether there's some lessons that the New South Wales Government can learn about these protocols. As I understand it, the issuing of aliases is a part of hospital operating systems where they think that will be important to protect patient safety, but obviously there are questions around the use of that protocol in this case that Ryan Park is keen to get to the bottom of because we know that Jewish Australians in our health care system have been nervous about antisemitism in health care. That's why late last year I asked all health ministers to issue a directive to the professional regulator of doctors and nurses and other health professionals really to lift their game in overseeing the health care system and making sure that Jewish Australians felt that they could get safe, high-quality health care without any sense of discrimination in the system. That was particularly important, obviously, after the awful case of those two Bankstown nurses that you'll remember.
 
CLENNELL: Parliament resumes on Tuesday with the Nationals effectively on the backbench. How will it operate? Are all the Nationals’ shadow ministers to lose their salaries and staff? Will the Liberals have half the questions in question time now, say four or five out of nine or ten?
 
BUTLER: Well, it's going to be a shambles on the other side of the Parliament. That's the only thing you can be sure of. I listened to your interview with Anne Ruston, who I'm sure would want to be spending all of her time trying to put pressure on me as my Shadow in Health and Aged Care and Disabilities. Instead, she's spending all of her energy trying to protect Sussan Ley. I don't understand how Angus Taylor is still on the front bench. He is so obviously putting together a leadership challenge. He and James Patterson had that meeting in the lead up to a funeral of one their colleagues last week and had the TV cameras there or some cameras there. It's all out in the open. There's a small opposition now of barely 28 members and that is split right down the middle between Sussan Ley's supporters and Angus Taylor's supporters. How they're going to be able to pull all of that mess together to provide, really, the job that they have to do for the Australian people, which is to present an alternative in the Parliament to the Government, is beyond me.
 
CLENNELL: Mark Butler, thank you for your time.