Radio interview with Minister Butler, ABC RN - 3 July 2026

Media event date: 3 July 2026 Date published: 3 July 2026 Media type: Media release General public MELISSA CLARKE, HOST: Now to federal politics, and the Labor-led parliamentary inquiry into fraud in the National Disability Insurance Scheme has urged the government to crack down on NDIS kickbacks and bad actors. It comes after a separate Senate inquiry scrutinising the government’s proposed overhaul of the NDIS was extended last week until mid-August.

Mark Butler is the Minister for Health, Ageing and the NDIS. Minister, welcome back to Radio National Breakfast. MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS : Thanks Mel.

Now, there are 12 recommendations from this parliamentary inquiry that have come back to improve the integrity of the scheme, including things like creating stronger whistle blower protections and a system to manage conflicts of interest. Are these recommendations that you will adopt? They are recommendations we're considering very carefully.

They touch on some areas we're working on in any event, and we've had a couple of discussions with the Opposition about some of these issues. They're very keen on making sure we maximise our ability to clamp down on fraud and integrity issues in the scheme, as certainly we are. That's work we've been doing since 2022.

I really welcome the report from the Joint Standing Committee. It's got some very good suggestions. Many of them, as I said, we were working on anyway, but we'll work through that report as we will the other inquiry.

How quickly could you respond to them? Is this something that you could make amendments to the measures around reforming the NDIS and include it in that passage? Are you able to move that quickly?

Well, on some things we may well be able to move that quickly. We had a debate in the House of Representatives on the bill this week. We passed, I think, more than 30 amendments to the bill.

We certainly remain very open to considering sensible amendments to the bill when it reaches the Senate in, I think, about six or seven weeks as well. One of the recommendations was around establishing an NDIS worker registration scheme. That's previously been recommended by a taskforce, maybe 18 months, two years ago.

How come this hasn't been something the Government's moved on? We're very keen to work on registration schemes for workers across the care economy, not just in the NDIS but also in the aged care sector as well. That's something that Sam Rae and Jenny McAllister are working on.

Our priority right now is to register providers. It doesn't make much sense to have workers registered if they're employed by providers who are not registered and whom we know nothing about. As you know, Mel, the bill before the Parliament has a range of measures to bring more providers under the scope of registration.

Last week we registered for the first time providers of supported independent living and platform providers, so we're moving at a pace really to make sure that the few hundred thousand organisations and companies that are providing services are registered, that they tick a range of boxes around quality and we have a good line of sight of who they are and what their character is.

The worker registration, I think, follows on from that. And that's something we'll want to continue working on as well. When it comes to the reform legislation that you've put before Parliament, we've seen the Senate set out an eight-week inquiry.

You were very much urging the crossbench and the Coalition and the Greens not to delay the progress of this legislation. But nonetheless, we have this inquiry process now. Are you satisfied that you may well learn something that is useful and can contribute to a better outcome in the legislation by waiting just another two months?

As I said, I thought the Parliament was ready to consider the legislation during the past fortnight. But I'm a realist. I understand the numbers in the Senate.

We'll take this extended inquiry very seriously and treat it with the respect that all of those inquiries deserve. And more importantly, the people who turn up to the public hearings when they have them or make further submissions, of course, we'll be monitoring that very closely as we have this latest report that you talked about in your earlier comments. You passed major reforms to aged care at the end of 2024 and as we're seeing now, the details of the new system still are requiring change and adjustment that's happening right now.

Given you're now going through a similar major reform process with the NDIS, is there a bit of a lesson there from the aged care process that going a little bit slower and taking more feedback on board might be a better way to go than trying to rush it through as soon as possible? The bill that passed the House yesterday was the subject or really the product of work that's been underway for years now.

Much of it really drew from the independent review of the NDIS that took place three years ago that was adopted by the National Cabinet. All the premiers, the Prime Minister, three years ago now. This has been the subject of very detailed work for a number of years.

As I said at the Press Club and I've said in the Parliament, I think the community recognises that we need to do some pretty serious work to get the NDIS back on track, to crack down on some of the shonks and the fraudsters, but also deal with some of the cost blowouts that, frankly, we haven't been able to deal with in the way in which we wanted to. Of course, we continue to take advice and listen to submissions from people in the community and from experts and providers, but we do have to get on with the work of securing the future of the NDIS.

You're listening to Radio National Breakfast, where we're speaking to the Minister for Health and NDIS, Mark Butler. Minister, you've recently spoken about the need for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme to evolve. Can you explain what you think needs to change about the PBS to make sure it's still working effectively in contemporary times?

The nature of medicines is changing, as many of your listeners will understand. We're lucky enough, frankly, to be living through this incredible period of discovery, which is bringing on new medicines to the global market almost every month that not too many years ago were unthinkable, providing new treatments and even cures for some conditions. That's a terrific problem to have or challenge to have.

The medicines are more complex. They're more personalised, usually, rather than being big blockbuster tablets that are relatively easy to assess and then approve. So, there's just a lot more work to get the medicines that we want available to Australian patients.

And that complex work has been made even more complex by the fact that the US administration under President Trump has profoundly changed their medicines policy and that is reverberating right through the world. Every country, every pharmaceutical company is trying to come to grips with what that means for their system. And we're no different in that respect either.

And we're seeing that with some of the drug companies behind the GLP-1 weight loss drugs. They're worried that when they deal with the PBS that they're being ranked against lowest cost alternatives rather than more commonly used alternatives. Is that the kind of change that you could make to the PBS and how it assesses medicines that might mean we're more likely to be able to strike deals with companies to bring these new groundbreaking medicines to make them more accessible for Australians?

I think we recognise that the PBS has been extraordinarily successful. We get excellent value for money as taxpayers in providing Australian patients with access to the world's best medicines at very affordable prices, affordable obviously for them at the pharmacy counter when we've been making that even cheaper, but affordable for the budget overall a time when more and more medicines are coming onto the market.

The change that the US has made is going to impact pricing right across the world, and pharmaceutical companies who've made so much of their money out of the American market - about 50 per cent of their volume, but about 70 per cent of their profits are made just from the Americans. If they think that's under pressure, they're going to be worried about markets like Australia, the European markets, Japan and the like.

So we have to tread carefully through that, obviously assess Australia's interests rather than the interests of these individual pharmaceutical companies and make sure the PBS keeps delivering for people. We want to make sure that Australians continue to get access to the world's best medicines and they do it at affordable prices. Mark Butler, thanks very much for speaking to Breakfast this morning.

Thanks, Mel. The Hon Mark Butler MP Disability and carers Accessibility We acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country throughout Australia, and their continuing connection to land, sea and community. We pay our respects to them and their cultures, and to Elders both past and present. © Commonwealth of Australia