TV interview with Minister Butler, Today Show - 23 April 2026

SARAH ABO, HOST: Well, 160,000 Australians are about to be kicked off the NDIS in hopes of saving $15 billion by 2030.
 
KARL STEFANOVIC, HOST: To discuss, we’re joined by Mr Fix-It, Health Minister Mark Butler, live from Canberra. Mark Good morning to you. Thanks for your time.
 
ABO: Hi, Mark.
 
STEFANOVIC: Look, how are you going to choose who gets kicked off the NDIS? How do you come up with that number?
 
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: Over coming months, we’ll be working with a technical advisory group, but most importantly with the disability community itself and then with states and territories to design that tool. This has been the subject of recommendations for a long time. The scheme was set up in the first place to support people with significant and permanent disability, but its scope has gone much bigger than that. A whole lot of people are on the scheme with relatively low to moderate support needs who were never intended to be covered by it in the first place. I’m not blaming them for that, the fact is those supports that used to exist for people like that were dismantled or at least wound back very seriously. While we are designing this tool, we also have to rebuild those local community supports in partnership with state governments.
 
ABO: 160,000, though, is a very specific number, Minister. How did you land on that? And, I mean, I imagine this is going to take so many resources to actually get through that number and who is going to be kicked off.
 
BUTLER: I’ve tried to be very clear yesterday that that was our initial modelling, about 160,000. It might end up being a number that’s a little bit different to that because we haven't designed the tool yet. But I tried to give people a sense of where we think the scheme should be to return it to its original intent, as I said, supporting people with significant and permanent disability. It was expected by the end of this decade that maybe 550,000 people would be on the scheme to keep true to its original purpose. The way we're going, almost a million people will be on the scheme, and that's just, first of all, not sustainable, but also not the appropriate type of support for people who have those lower to more moderate support needs.
 
ABO: But if you haven't designed the tool yet, Minister, how do you actually know the impact and financially how much you're going to save?
 
BUTLER: As I said, I tried to be honest. This was initial modelling. We've got to do more work, but I wanted to embark upon that journey with people having eyes wide open about where we're likely to end up.
 
ABO: So that number could change and will change?
 
BUTLER: That number could change. But broadly, I think people understand that the group with significant permanent disability is about what was projected when the scheme was being built 13, 14 years ago. It's gone much bigger than that. We already started a process around Thriving Kids that I heard you talk to Nick Coatsworth about earlier this morning for kids under nine, so we have some experience of building these systems. That's in the process of being rolled out by state governments now with significant financial support from the Commonwealth. We now need to replicate that work for the rest of the population where that's appropriate.
 
STEFANOVIC: It is a national disability scheme. I mean, it sounds like you're buck-passing a chunk of the national disability scheme to the states who don’t have the financial structures and capacity to take more on. Isn't that a cop-out?
 
BUTLER: It's a national scheme, but it was always developed in partnership with state and territory governments. They are co-stewards of the scheme. I can't frankly do much in relation to the NDIS car without getting the support and the consent, frankly, of state and territory governments. We run this scheme together. But also, way back in 2023, the National Cabinet, so all the premiers and chief ministers and the PM, agreed to set up this system of what they called foundational supports, supports outside of the NDIS in the community. As I heard Dr Coatsworth say, these used to exist. There was a life before the NDIS where -
 
ABO: But I guess, Minister, the issue is, this is an issue of Labor's doing here. I mean, it wasn't so long ago that Bill Shorten, who was your predecessor in this role, was saying there's nothing to see here. The Opposition's harping on, calling this terrorism, or I think was the actual word he used. I mean, you let this get away from you without acting when you should have, and now it's gotten to a point where you've got families right across the country concerned about their children being taken off it and not knowing what the future holds.
 
BUTLER: I don't accept the political characterisation. This scheme was built up over a decade of coalition government, but I don't seek to evade responsibility for the Labor Party for some of the flaws in the scheme design. I try to be honest about that.
 
As to those support systems outside the NDIS, we're building that with Thriving Kids, for kids under nine who have more to moderate needs, for example, with developmental delay or autism. And I've been very clear, we need to build them for the rest of the population. These changes that I announced yesterday wouldn't take effect until the year after next. We do have time, but I've also been clear there's a lot of work to do, and we need to get to that work with the disability community and with states and territories very smartly.
 
I had a meeting with the disability ministers only yesterday afternoon to start to talk about how we'd do that. I think there's a shared sense that this scheme has been terrific for people with disability, but it's way off track.
 
STEFANOVIC: For sure.
 
BUTLER: And its future is at risk. We've got to do a major reset on this thing.
 
STEFANOVIC: Well, look, you know, I don't know how you're going to go with the states. I mean, some of them seemed pretty shocked yesterday. And I don't know how much money you're going to have to pour into it. I guess that's for another day on what you're going to supplement it with and help them out with. But just getting rid of the rorts, so when can we expect the rorts to stop?
 
BUTLER: We've been building our battle, frankly, against the fraudsters and the shonks in the scheme. There are more prosecutions than ever before, more providers being kicked off the scheme. But part of the challenge I talked about yesterday is we don't really have a line of sight on who actually is billing the NDIS. There are 600,000 claims every day with no evidence -
 
STEFANOVIC: So how does that stop?
 
BUTLER: No line of sight. The first thing we'll do is set up a digital payment system. If you are billing the NDIS, we want to know what your bank account is so that we know the merit of the claim and we know who is getting the money at the moment. You've got some small-time crooks and fraudsters making money off this scheme, but the criminal intelligence -
 
ABO: Can you rely, though, Minister, on the digital world? I mean, it's not as though we haven't seen scams digitally before.
 
BUTLER: Sure, but frankly, it's a lot better than we have now where people write out a bill on an A4 piece of paper with a pen and send it in to the NDIS for thousands of dollars and it's just paid. It's got to be better than that. And as you'd expect with a honeypot like that, organised crime has got themselves into it as well. Doing that, the digital payment system, making sure that more providers have to be registered and checked for their quality, we know their quality of character, their quality of qualifications to deliver disability services in the first place. That is another reform I announced yesterday that will introduce much more integrity into this cherished scheme.
 
STEFANOVIC: Big job ahead. Mark, always good to talk to you. Thank you.
 
ABO: Yeah, it's in everyone's interest to get it right.
 
BUTLER: Thanks, guys.