Imagine admitting that children are being experimented on, with harmful, lifelong consequences, and still not doing anything substantial about it.

Well, you don’t have to imagine because that is exactly what Australia’s health minister, Mark Butler, has done.

Despite the UK Cass Report, despite New Zealand, Finland, Norway and Sweden banning the use of harmful chemical castration drugs known as puberty blockers, and despite the US health report that condemns experimenting on children, the best Butler could come up with is that the treatments are “contested and evolving”.

It is reprehensible that a health minister would make such a statement and admit that – despite evidence from around the world – he is satisfied with an extremely slow-moving inquiry, which won't be complete until 2028.

How many children must be subjected to cruel, ineffective medicalisation which creates a cohort of lifelong pharmaceutical consumers?

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler says the science underpinning the prescription of puberty blockers to children is “contested and evolving,” after New Zealand on Wednesday moved to ban the practice, following similar steps in the UK, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

Mr Butler indicated he remained comfortable with his government’s position of asking the National Health and Medical Research Council to review gender-affirming care – with recommendations regarding puberty blockers due mid next year and the final report not due until 2028.

The federal health minister has palmed responsibility off to the states, thinking he can wash his hands of the extraordinary harm being perpetrated in the name of gender ideology.

“They are not PBS prescriptions. They are prescriptions made off-label by clinicians employed by state governments. So ultimately, state governments have to decide whether or not these prescriptions are delivered by their services,” Mr Butler said.

“Our responsibility as the commonwealth is to ensure that state governments, parents, and the community have the best possible clinical advice from the pre-eminent authority in this area, which is the National Health and Medical Research Council.”

Off-label means the chemical castration drugs known as puberty blockers, as well as cross-sex hormones, are being used for cases they have not been approved for. There is not enough data or research to back their usage but the health minister doesn’t seem concerned at all.

As many politicians do, he refused to act despite knowing the potential outcomes.

“I think that’s pretty compelling, that they say this is a contested area, and it’s evolving. It is still a relatively new model of care anywhere around the world, and as you know … it is highly contested by clinicians and by people more broadly in the community.

“That’s why I thought it was so important, particularly in a contested space, that we ask a pre-eminent authority to issue guidelines, which I hope will be, once they’re issued, regarded by everyone, including state governments, as deeply compelling, whatever they end up deciding, but ultimately, that’s a matter that’s still under way.”

Independent researchers around the world have already concluded that these drugs and interventions are harmful to children, who are too immature to consent to the catastrophic harm inflicted upon them. Why are Mark Butler and the Labor government so insistent on dragging this process out any longer?