The member for renters: How Max Chandler-Mather went from young Labor to PM’s foe

Max Chandler-Mather estimates he knocked on 15,000 inner-city Brisbane doors in the lead-up to the 2022 election, where he wrested the seat of Griffith from Labor frontbencher Terri Butler.

Those thousands of hours gave the Greens MP a message to take to Canberra – one that has increasingly frustrated the federal government as it attempts to pass legislation enabling its $10 billion housing affordability fund, a key election commitment.

As Labor argues the fund is needed to address the critical problems of housing affordability and availability, Chandler-Mather has one response on behalf of his constituents as well as renters around Australia: not good enough.

Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather is taking the fight on housing to the government.Credit: Paul Harris

“I’d certainly had an experience of trying to get a giant pile of rubbish moved out of the yard for like a year, finally issuing a breach notice because the real estate agent tells us to do it, and the landlord literally rocks up the next day and threatens us with eviction,” he says.

“I don’t think people in parliament necessarily understand how that makes you feel.”

Labor’s frustration with the Greens’ intransigence on the Housing Australia Future Fund is palpable. A bill that was supposed to sail through parliament has been stymied by the minor party and the Coalition, leading Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to threaten to use it as a double-dissolution election trigger.

Annoyance boiled ever at the end of the tense winter sitting period when Chandler-Mather accused Albanese of misrepresenting him in question time. Photographs capture Albanese firing back, with sources reporting the prime minister told the first-time MP: “You’re a joke mate”.

The baby-faced 31-year-old father has riled up the hardened political warrior like no other MP.

A tense exchange between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Max Chandler-Mather at the end of question time in June.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“The level of hostility here [in Canberra] is far, far, far, far greater than anything I’ve ever experienced doorknocking,” Chandler-Mather says.

“Give me a choice and I will 100 per cent of the time pick doorknocking in Carina Heights over having to sit through question time.”

He knows a lot about doorknocking after campaigning over the years for local and state candidates and, mostly recently, himself.

“You get to the end of a doorknock and you feel great because you’ve had, like, 10 to 15 conversations with people, you’ve learned something about people’s lives: it changes your politics a little bit,” Chandler-Mather says in an interview in his parliamentary office in Canberra.

Now he is attempting to change politics more than a little, representing renters at a time when rents are skyrocketing and homeownership looks more unattainable than ever for many people.

Chandler-Mather is one of only a handful of MPs who rent, and his message resonates well beyond the chamber with the third of the population that also has a landlord. His social media posts rack up tens of thousands of views and comments, strengthening the Greens’ resolve to demand greater concessions from the federal government on housing affordability and renters’ rights.

“It is a visceral anger and powerlessness and injustice,” he says, “that has some fundamental effect on the material conditions of your life for no other reason other than our country has decided we’re going to throw renters to the wolves.”

He says most politicians are unfamiliar with the reality of renting.

“I think that probably does affect the way they make decisions around politics or maybe leads them to a decision that it’s okay for instance not to pursue any rental reforms, assuming that people will be okay to wait for that,” he says.

“But until you’ve had that experience, maybe you won’t understand why a lot of people maybe are switching to the Greens for instance.”

Chandler-Mather himself turned to the Greens less than a decade ago.

He grew up in West End, in Brisbane’s inner south, in the same electorate he now represents. He describes his parents as “big lefties” although not politically active; his father was a librarian and his mother was a social worker who later joined the public service.

Chandler-Mather joined the Whitlam Club, part of the young Labor movement, at university.

“I like Gough Whitlam – free university,” he says, but he quickly grew disillusioned with Labor.

“You were convinced to join often on the argument that ‘look, you might not agree with everything they’re doing but you can join it and we can change it from the inside’,” he says.

“But as an institution, it seemed utterly incapable of changing, and every year things seemed to get worse.”

Chandler-Mather left the party in 2013 because of the then-Labor federal government’s decisions on asylum seekers and cuts to the single parenting payment.

But he didn’t become involved with the Greens until 2016, when he worked on local council elections, an experience he describes as “transformative”.

“[We thought] if we can only reach enough people and have these face-to-face conversations and organise at scale and talk about renters’ rights and talk about these things that electoral politics hasn’t focused on in a long time, actually, a lot of people would vote for that, and it happened.”

The message to voters helped get Jonathan Sriranganathan elected to represent The Gabba Ward on the Brisbane City Council. Sriranganathan, who stepped down earlier this year, says renters were being ignored by the major parties.

“We recognised that there was another layer of voters out there, particularly younger renters, who were open to swinging to the Greens if we started speaking their language,” he says.

“Max played a big part in helping refine that message and pitch.”

Chandler-Mather then worked on the 2017 and 2020 state elections, helping Amy MacMahon sweep former Labor minister Jackie Trad out of the seat of South Brisbane three years ago.

Sriranganathan says the thousands of hours spent doorknocking residents have shaped Chandler-Mather’s policies.

“He has a very strong sense of what his political values are, and what kind of political strategy the country needs right now.”

Chandler-Mather says he is simply sharing the voices of his constituents on a national stage.

“The way I communicate in the media these days is largely informed as a result of conversations I’ve had with thousands and thousands of people on the ground, and I sort of think that’s how representative politics should work,” he says.

He is eyeing an even bigger brawl over housing security.

Next is a push to phase out negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions, policies Labor tried unsuccessfully to change under Bill Shorten’s leadership.

“Then the broader plan is convincing the government of a proper mass build of public housing in the same way European countries do,” he said.

“Winning the argument that someone could live in a really well-built, government-built home for subsidised rent or buy it for cheap, and that we can do that at scale – for me medium-term, that’s how we fix the housing crisis.”

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