TV interview with Minister Butler, Sunrise – 11 September 2026

Media event date: 11 September 2026 Date published: 11 September 2026 Media type: General public NATALIE BARR, HOST: Your rent could soon hike by $10 a week according to Australia's leading property bodies, who united to conduct modelling on the government's housing tax changes from the federal budget. Despite the Treasurer insisting rents would only rise by $2 per week, industry experts say it could be five times more because of reforms to negative gearing, capital gains tax and self-managed super funds.

Let's bring in Health Minister Mark Butler and Deputy Opposition Leader Jane Hume. Good morning to both of you. Mark, these are the nation's top property bodies.

We've got the Master Builders, the Property Council, the Real Estate Institute and Housing Industry. They're all saying rents are going to go up a lot higher than your Treasury modelling predicts and that you'll build 10,000 fewer homes than you want to. Are you absolutely confident your numbers were right?

MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS : Yeah, I'm very confident, Nat. Good morning, by the way. Treasury models policy for governments of both political persuasions.

That is their job. Time and time again, we see industry modelling, usually from industry bodies who don't want governments to change anything, any way in which they're making a profit. They frankly overstate the position.

I see it all the time in my own portfolio. I'm certainly backing the Treasury modelling here. And just look at the facts, the two and a half or three million private rental properties out there are protected from any change from the May Budget.

If they're negatively gearing, they can continue to do that. Look at another fact, rents have increased by less since the Budget than they did over the same period before the Budget. Okay, so Jane, talk us through these.

Basically the Government saying this is a bunch of vested interests, saying they don't like these things because it'll hurt them. Is that true? JANE HUME, DEPUTY OPPOSITION LEADER: This is just a denial of reality, Nat.

There's a trifecta of failures that Labor have overseen in the housing market. Fewer homes are being built, rents are higher, and now there is less investment as well. And the fact that Labor knew that they were pushing up rents when they increased taxes on housing is bizarre in the first place.

And they put a number in their Budget, and now we're hearing that number is about- going to be about five times higher than Treasury anticipated. That's the reality that Australians and particularly renters are facing every single day. You can bury your head in those Treasury numbers, but Australians will tell you that their rents are going up, that the approvals for loans are going down, and that the market is tanking because of Labor's taxes.

Now, we've said things desperately need to change. By linking migration numbers to housing, you can reduce demand pressures. By making sure that you invest in that enabling infrastructure, you can build up to 400,000 new homes that wouldn't otherwise have been built.

By changing the National Construction Code and slashing red tape, you can reduce the cost of building a new home. And by axing Labor’s toxic taxes, you will encourage more confidence in the market again because this has been a terrible failure of policy from the Labor government. Yeah, some of those things are being addressed? : Loan approvals are actually up.

Loan approvals for new building, which was the whole purpose of this policy, are at record levels. The ABS said they've never been as high to build the new homes that we need, not to have investments swishing around existing stock. New home borrowers have dried up.

No one's buying new homes right now because they know that if they buy something today, the value of that might go down, not up, in the next 12 months. : You're talking about existing homes, Jane. We're talking about building new stock, which is what we need in this country. Those loans are up.

Builders are telling us that there is no business. I think they’ve gone up slightly, haven’t they? They've gone up a few hundred. : Yeah, the ABS, the Bureau of Statistics, says that new loans, new bank loans for new homes, building new homes are at higher levels than they've ever been before.

Okay, let's move on. The Government is hoping to win the Coalition's support for major immigration reforms, which include restricting asylum seeker applications to within the first few months of their time in this country and stopping international students extending their stay by appealing visa rejections. Jane, this is the PM's pitch to Angus Taylor.

Will you guys support it? Nat, migration numbers have been too high and standards have been too low for way too long. Labor have missed their own housing targets- sorry, their own migration targets every single year that they have been in Government.

But this is their modus operandi. Every single time Labor come to Parliament, every time they come to Government, they lose control of our borders and migration runs out of control. The Coalition is always the party that has to clean it up.

Now the Prime Minister has come and sought our help, we've given him a list of the practical, sensible solutions that we think can bring those numbers down and strengthen our borders, raise the standard of migrants here to bring in the skills that we need. The ball is now in the Prime Minister's court, let's see what he does with it. But to be honest, I don't have much faith in Labor's target because they've missed it every time.

Mark, it seems that the problem seems to be people staying here and visa hopping. Then 200 British citizens claimed asylum last year after years of spending years here, then they're all rejected. Surely that's an abuse of the system.

How do we find this out years later? Why isn't someone in Government stopping this years before it happens? : Jane is right, there are some what I hope will be productive discussions happening between the two major parties. We've got migration numbers down by almost a half from their COVID peak.

But we have said we want to get them down further to get that balance right between what the country can absorb and what the economy needs, for example, to staff our hospitals and to pick the produce that our farmers grow as well. And there are some settings in the migration arrangements, some of them going back to John Howard that mean that it is difficult to control those numbers.

For example, he uncapped the number of students who could come to Australia. When we tried to put that … So why can’t you cap them? : When we tried to put that cap in place during the last term of Parliament, Jane voted against that in the Senate. Now she’s got a different view about that.

Oh Mark, you're not really blaming John Howard for your migration failures? : He uncapped the student market… Why are we still stuck with this? I think we all agree we need to put in place different arrangements, and that's the purpose of these discussions. They didn’t work last term, we weren’t able to come to an agreement that would cap the student market, which is just one example.

And I think there are some productive negotiations taking place between the Prime Minister, Angus Taylor, and obviously the relevant portfolio people as well. Yeah, okay, let's hope so because this visa hopping just seems like something everyone's got to sort out. Thank you very much.

Let us know how the discussions go. The Hon Mark Butler MP About the department 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