Why this young Green Turk troubles Albanese to the Max

Anthony Albanese does not hide his disdain for Max Chandler-Mather when the young Greens MP takes a shot at the prime minister in parliament. Albanese has mocked his opponent as a “student politician” and dismissed him as a “joke” in one exchange at the end of question time.

The prime minister knows exactly what this young Turk is up to with his all-out assault on Labor to force it to spend more on housing and do more to help renters. After all, Albanese was a young Turk himself. The leader and the upstart both came from Labor families, both joined the Labor left in their teens and both muscled their way past their seniors and into political office.

A tense exchange in parliament between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

For Albanese, this meant being branded a radical from the “hard left” of his party. For Chandler-Mather, it meant quitting Labor at the age of 21 and winning the prize Brisbane seat of Griffith – Kevin Rudd’s old seat – for the Greens.

Now the tension between the two men sums up the competition between Labor and the Greens on a single, totemic issue: the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund that Albanese promised at the last election but Chandler-Mather will not accept. Part of the conflict is ideological – because the Greens always want to spend more money on social policy – but a big part of it is generational.

Albanese, born 1963, and Chandler-Mather, born 1992, are in a personal contest to claim the voters of the future. The Greens frame Labor as the soft party that protects the status quo, while promising younger Australians a far more radical solution: freezing rents nationwide, spending at least $2.5 billion a year on social housing, doubling rent assistance to about $3.5 billion a year and ending negative gearing for property investors. There is no doubt who is “hard left” here.

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The Greens give the impression they are winning. When Chandler-Mather walks the corridors of Parliament House, holding a mobile phone to his ear because he is always on message, he greets journalists with an almighty grin that shows he is having the time of his life. When housing experts turn up to his community meetings, they report a pulsating support for the Greens MP from constituents who are fed up with high house prices and rising rents.

Albanese, meanwhile, has pulled back from any hints about an early election. He spoke about a trigger for a double dissolution after the Greens and the Coalition blocked the Housing Australia Future Fund bill earlier this year. “We want this to be passed,” the prime minister said on July 28. “The way to ensure that this doesn’t provide a trigger is to pass the legislation.” A few days later he moderated his language. “It doesn’t necessarily provide for an early election,” he said. “It could go into 2025.”

The careful language is smart. Voters are in no mood for an early election. Even the threat of going to the polls early would be an indulgence for Albanese and his ministers when they are meant to be governing. There is, however, a potential trigger if the Senate vetoes the housing fund when it goes to another vote in October. The last double dissolution election, in 2016, saw the Greens lose a seat in the Senate. Do they really want to run that risk again?

Greens leader Adam Bandt has been pragmatic on earlier government bills such as the Safeguard Mechanism to cut carbon emissions, so there is a suspicion that he is more inclined to pass the housing package than Chandler-Mather. The Greens clearly need more time to figure out their stance. They sought on Thursday to set October 24 as the new deadline for a Senate inquiry and report.

So who is winning? This is not a game: nobody is “playing politics” here because the Greens are seeking to lift their primary vote, take seats off Labor and change federal policy. It is too soon, however, to be sure about whether this is working. So far, at least, Labor and Albanese have a solid lead on housing policy in the Resolve Political Monitor poll published by this masthead.

No, prime minister ... Anthony Albanese after his exchange with Max Chandler-Mather. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

In July, for instance, 32 per cent of voters said Labor and Albanese were the best to handle housing, while 19 per cent preferred the Coalition and 15 per cent said others, while 34 per cent were undecided. This is in line with results when voters are asked about other policy issues, such as keeping down the cost of living. But these regular questions focus on the two major parties and do not routinely ask about the Greens. The key point is that Labor’s support on housing is not especially low.

The Greens are not gaining ground nationwide, either. The Labor primary vote has gone from 32.6 per cent at the election to 39 or 40 per cent in the latest Resolve surveys, while the Greens have gone from 12.2 per cent at the election to 11 or 12 per cent in the surveys. So the battle over housing is very much about targeting a few city seats where the Greens can edge ahead of Labor on the primary vote and claim the prize on preferences – exactly what Chandler-Mather did in Griffith.

Younger voters now have a real contest for their support. The Greens have a simplistic policy with their call for a national rent freeze, given that state premiers such as Chris Minns in NSW rule out the idea fearing it would hurt housing supply, but they are harnessing the frustration of renters who have no reason to trust any assurances about gentle policy change.

Since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, says research from the Reserve Bank, rents paid by new tenants have increased by 24 per cent. The impact is lower for tenants who’ve stayed in the same property through those years, but the financial pain is enormous and must be addressed by political leaders.

Albanese meets state premiers and territory chief ministers in Brisbane on Wednesday and is confident of a deal on housing. The likely outcome will be a promise to change planning and zoning laws to ensure new homes are built more quickly and an agreement on national principles on renters’ rights.

Problem solved? Not at all. The national cabinet deal will stop short of the demands from the Greens for explicit laws to freeze rents and embrace the long-term leases seen in Europe. Calls for more radical change will continue to resonate.

The immediate fight in parliament – the stalling of the $10 billion fund – becomes a smaller part of this generational contest over time. The fund only adds 30,000 dwellings over five years, albeit with the important change of setting up a permanent structure that can be expanded in later years. Albanese is pursuing other policies that will make the housing fund less totemic.

Labor has given the states and territories a surprise $2 billion for social housing, increased rent assistance by 15 per cent, promised $2 billion in financing for community housing providers, and is trying to sign up superannuation funds and other investors for a National Housing Accord that aims to build 1 million homes. At each stage, Albanese unveils more policy that does not need a vote from the Greens because the last thing he wants is to give them any credit.

Would all of this happen without pressure from the Greens? Of course not. The contest is on. Albanese may not be a man of the “hard left” any more, but he still knows how to go hard.

David Crowe is chief political correspondent.

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