Radio interview with Minister Butler and Simon Beaumont, 6PR – 18 March 2025

SIMON BEAUMONT, HOST: Mark Butler is the Federal Health Minister, and he joins us now. He's on tour. G'day, Mark. Good to talk to you.
 
MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: Morning, Simon.
 
BEAUMONT: You're the Member for Hindmarsh in South Australia. I haven't spoken to you before. Are you Port Adelaide or Adelaide Crows if either?
 
BUTLER: It  used to be called the electorate of Port Adelaide. It is centred in the heartland of the most successful football club in Australia with 36 premierships and counting. So yes, Port Adelaide man.
 
BEAUMONT: Alright.
 
BUTLER: Not feeling great about the season so far but anyway it’s early days.
 
BEAUMONT: No it wasn't great on the weekend. First question’s first. The state health minister, we've got a new one here in WA and you're the federal fella in the chair at the moment. How close do you work with a with the state health ministers? And how close have you worked with Amber-Jade Sanderson over here?
 
BUTLER: I really enjoyed working with Amber-Jade. I've known her for many years. She's incredibly talented and dedicated. She obviously drove a hard bargain for Western Australia, as everyone from this state does. But she was constructive, mature, really terrific to work with. The truth is the health ministers across the country probably work more closely together than most ministers, because we have to: our health systems are very much interconnected. We're obviously big funders of the hospital systems. But no part of the health system is an island, they all work together. And so we meet regularly, we talk regularly. And frankly, political party doesn't really matter so much. We've got Liberal and Labor health ministers across the country, and we work pretty constructively as a team. I'm sure I will with Meredith, who I don't know, but I'm looking forward to working with her.
 
BEAUMONT: So for our listeners broadly, where is the delineation? My rudimentary understanding is: federal health can be involved in bricks and mortars, bricks and mortar initiatives, projects, buildings, things like the urgent care centres, which you're, going to talk about today. GPs and bulk billing of GPs, that's been an announcement thus far from your government, probably one of the biggest ones we've heard so far?
 
BUTLER: State governments really operate the hospital system. That's their big responsibility. We do a lot of the work outside of hospitals. But patients move very much between the two. At the end of the day, we're all focused on patient outcomes. Our job as the Commonwealth is to help fund the hospital system. Next year, the next financial year, we will lift our funding to Western Australia by 11 per cent. That's the biggest increase in hospital funding in many, many, many years to WA. We know that we need to do more to support the hard working doctors and nursing staff and other health professionals in the WA hospital system.
 
Part of our job is to fund a well-functioning hospital systems across the country. But we do, essentially, fund and operate primary care. Your GPs, your psychologists, your allied health professionals out in the community, aged care, which obviously is an important feeder into hospitals as well. We're trying to lift bulk billing rates. We're trying to cut medicine prices, we know that's an important issue for people's health as well as their household budget. As you said, we're also rolling out this new model of care around Australia, Urgent Care Clinics, which are designed to take pressure off hospital beds but also provide people with much better options to receive urgent care out in their own community.
 
BEAUMONT: So, Mark. I'm talking to Mark Butler, the Federal Health Minister. I see the list of six of these facilities that should open or will open in Western Australia for you guys are re-elected: Bateman, Ellenbrook, Geraldton, Mirrabooka, Mundaring and Yanchep. So one of those is regional. In order for them to be successful and be full of patients who are not putting pressure on our EDs, what can a consumer expect from them? Can you be bulk billed or can you bulk bill at these?
 
BUTLER: You must. You must. That's a really important design feature for us: they must be bulk billing. I've just been at the Beeliar Urgent Care Clinic. I promised at the last election we'd open 50 of them across the country. We've opened 87, including eight here in WA. Beeliar has already seen more than 21,000 patients through their doors. About a third of the patients are under 15, they're kids who fall off their skateboard and bust their arm or get injured at Saturday afternoon sport. And mums and dads listening to your programme, Simon, know that if that happens on a Sunday, at the moment, the only option is to take them to the hospital ED and you'll end up waiting there hours and hours. Now these Urgent Care Clinics are another option. They're open seven days a week, extended hours, so into the evening, and importantly, they're fully bulk billed. All you need to take is your Medicare card and leave your credit card at home. And they're delivering really high quality urgent care. The doctors and nurses who are staffing these clinics often have a background in emergency medicine. You'll have imaging, x-ray facilities available, pathology facilities. They're just a terrific model of care, which is why we've said if we're re-elected, we'll open 50 more, including six here in WA. I've been to Ellenbrook, I've been to Yanchep yesterday, I've been to Bateman this morning. Just visiting those areas where an additional Medicare Urgent Care Clinic is going to make a real difference to the community.
 
BEAUMONT: How can you, as Federal Minister, guarantee to our listeners that the these will be bulk billing facilities?
 
BUTLER: We fund these clinics. What we do is, what we did in Beeliar, for example, is we put a call out to existing general practices for them to express an interest in becoming a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic. It went through a competitive process that was run at arm's length from the government. And the successful general practice then signs a contract with the Commonwealth. We provide them with funding for some equipment and also some block funding, so that they can guarantee they'll be open seven days a week. And a condition of the contract is they must bulk bill every single patient who comes through that door. Already they've seen across the country 1.3 million patients, every single one of whom has been bulk billed. It's taking pressure off the hospital EDs. But importantly, it's really giving patients high quality urgent care in a timely way close to their home. Once we open these additional 50, we reckon around 4 in 5 Australians will live within 20 minutes of a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic.
 
BEAUMONT: Alright. We covered the announcement by the PM on bulk billing. And he's pushed to see more bulk billing. We have a poor record, for whatever reason in WA of being the lowest bulk billing state of the jurisdictions, I believe. And I remember speaking to the AMA and, you know, some of the practitioners about this on this show. And they were concerned that it fundamentally changes the nature of a consultation that, you know, you do have consultations that involve co-morbidities or complex medical issues that this push from you guys is not going to address. They were worried that at the coalface, they wouldn't have if they were, you know, bulk billing, they wouldn't have time to address people's medical concerns. Is that sort of a shot across the bows or is that legit?
 
BUTLER: I don't agree with them on that. We're rolling out more and more information to GPs that shows, I think, very, very clearly that the vast bulk of general practices will be better off if they do more bulk billing and take up the funding that we've put on the table to reward them for doing that. It will be the biggest investment in Medicare in the 40-year history of the program. And it will start to turn around those bulk billing rates that you say, very rightly, are a real concern in the community. When we came to government, bulk billing was in freefall. Now we've turned that around for pensioners and for people who have a concession card. We put very significant additional money into bulk billing those patients the year before last and that has worked. Comfortably more than 90 per cent of those patients are being bulk billed. But for people who don't have a concession card, the bulk billing rates are still sliding. And that's what this latest round of investment was focused on. Expanding bulk billing funding for the first time to every single Australian. Now it's a huge investment in general practice. I'm confident it's good for general practitioners as well as being good for patients, but we're obviously in a dialogue with GPs about that.
 
BEAUMONT: We have two new ministerial portfolios announced today. One is around preventative health and who's a minister separate to Meredith Hammat. And we've also got one on health infrastructure is John Carey. So that sounds like bricks and mortar. So you might have you know, if you get back in you might have three of our ministers to deal with.
 
BUTLER: That's right a full court press. They're going to gang up on us. Health is such a big portfolio at a state level. It's a really hard slog for those ministers. Some of the ways in which that massive job is being carved up in different states is really interesting to me. I think a focus on prevention is something that a lot of members of the community have been calling for. Too often we focus all of our energy, for understandable reasons, on looking after people once they are sick. There's a lot more we could do as a country to lift our effort in preventing people from getting sick in the first place.
 
BEAUMONT: Yep. Talking to Mark Butler, one more from me, Minister, if I may, the Reserve Bank have announced today a new $5 note. It's going to have Parliament House on one side. This is the first time we haven't had a person on the note. So the Queen's been on the note since 1992. The other side of the note, Parliament House one side, Aboriginal artwork the other side. Are you happy with that?
 
BUTLER: I haven't used a note for a fair bit of time. I've got to say, I think it's important we keep cash in the economy. A lot of people say to me that they're concerned cash will disappear. As a government, we're committed to making sure that people can use cash well into the future if they want to. I don't use it as much as I used to. I haven't looked at a $5 note for a little while. But look, at the end of the day, these decisions are taken by the Reserve Bank I haven't really spent a lot of time thinking about that over the last couple of days. I've been here talking to members of this terrific community about ways in which we can improve Medicare and make it even stronger.
 
BEAUMONT: Alright. Thanks for the chat today. Thanks for talking to our listeners. Appreciate it. Thanks, Minister.
 
BUTLER: Thanks, Simon.