Cabinet colleagues say the veteran politician’s carriage of the NDIS firestorm shows his political judgement and collaborative style
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On the day the health minister, Mark Butler, revealed plans for an overhaul of the National Disability Insurance scheme in Canberra in April, his cabinet colleague, Katy Gallagher, witnessed a major shift.
Outlining some $40bn in cuts to the NDIS – a policy the Labor faithful consider a core achievement of the Rudd-Gillard years – Butler sparked a huge backlash from the disability community and risked anger from the party’s rank and file.
But despite this, Butler’s hard-headedness fuelled talk about him as a possible contender to succeed Anthony Albanese and become the next Labor prime minister.
“I was at the [National] Press Club on the day he talked about the NDIS savings,” Gallagher told Guardian Australia last week. “I could almost see around the table people going ‘Why have we not noticed this guy before?’
“I am not surprised people are paying attention now.”
A factional force and key ally of Albanese, Butler is at the centre of the Labor government and has carriage of some of its thorniest political priorities. But why, after nearly 20 years in politics, is he attracting so much attention now?
Butler has politics in his blood. His great-great-grandfather was Sir Richard Butler, who briefly served as premier of South Australia in 1905. Sir Richard Butler’s son, Richard Layton Butler was premier twice, in the 1920s and 1930s.
Despite that lineage, Butler’s own politics are inherited from someone much closer. His mum, Lindsay, is a former journalist and a lawyer, who later worked on Labor party communications for Bob Hawke’s campaigns in the 1980s.
Born in Canberra in 1970, Butler and his brother moved to Adelaide when their parents divorced. He attended Unley High, a few years behind future Labor leader Julia Gillard, and later studied law at Adelaide University, part of a circle that would go on to have an outsized role in Australian politics and media.
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Friends and contemporaries included Penny Wong, his now cabinet colleague, and future state premier Jay Weatherill. They knew journalists including Samantha Maiden and Annabel Crabb as well as future Australian Democrats leader Natasha Stott-Despoja.
Butler was drawn to Labor politics, in part through his friendship with Patrick Conlon, a future state government minister and member of “the Miscos” – the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union. Nick Bolkus, the Hawke and Keating government minister, was an early mentor. Butler later said many Labor members learned about politics “if not quite at the knee of Nick Bolkus then at the barbecues of Nick Bolkus.”
By the mid-1990s, Butler and Conlon agreed to enter state politics together, but Butler ended up as the secretary of the union instead, and, in 1997 became the Labor state president. Attending meetings of the national executive, he encountered a NSW Labor operative named Anthony Albanese for the first time.
