How Max Chandler-Mather gave method to the Greens’ madness
Called a ‘joke’ by Anthony Albanese, Max Chandler-Mather has taken his share of punches from Labor. Now he’s hitting back.
When the Prime Minister called him a joke in parliament, Max Chandler-Mather took it as proof that he must be doing something right. It’s fair to say there’s no love lost between Labor and the fresh-faced Greens MP from Brisbane.
Perhaps it’s because he was once a member of the ALP – the one who made for the door when the crackpot fringe of the Labor Left wasn’t mad enough for him, his detractors sniff.
Or maybe because he hit his old party where it hurt at last year’s federal election, masterminding a ground game for the Greens that delivered three surprise seats across the Queensland capital and cost Anthony Albanese a promising cabinet minister.
And could it be that the issue Chandler-Mather, 31, has since hung his hat on – the housing affordability crisis – is gaining traction with young voters and some of their parents to boot, to whom his demands for a national rent cap and billions for social housing don’t come across as the least bit silly, but a lot like what a progressive government should be doing.
“I think what they are trying to do in attacking me is deligitimising the ideas,” the young man says. “They don’t want to take it head-on … they’ve tried to use personal attacks, I think, as a tactic to essentially try and win in some way.
“Yes, it’s tough. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that my heart is going at a million miles an hour; I’d be lying if I said the adrenaline wasn’t pumping though me and it felt intense. But I take very seriously that my job is to go down there and represent all the people who voted for me. And that means not backing down when people try to throw their weight around, regardless of who it is.”
We’re talking in his electorate office on a crisp morning in Brisbane, picking up where we left off in June last year before Chandler-Mather took up his seat in parliament. Back then, the only piece of formal attire in his wardrobe was an ill-fitting sports jacket. So he had a suit made – just the one, for sitting weeks – that’s stuffed in a laundry bag behind his desk, ready to go to the dry cleaner for when he returns to Canberra next weeks for round two of the bout with Albanese over the government’s stalled $10bn Housing Australia Future Fund.
The splash he has made as the Greens’ housing and homelessness spokesman reflects both the potency of the issue and the political stakes involved. The diabolic confluence of a rental squeeze, 12 inflation-fuelled interest rate hikes and housing supply constraints is biting like never before, causing growing hardship in the community. Especially among the nation’s estimated eight million renters, members of the “asset-less” class that he wants to recruit to the Greens mostly at Labor’s expense.
Infuriatingly for the ALP, Chandler-Mather has the added credibility of having skin in the game. He’s one of the few members of parliament who actually lives as a renter in his inner-city division of Griffith, previously held by Kevin Rudd, where he grew up a few blocks over from the one-bedroom subdivide he shares with longtime partner Jo Horton. Until he landed the $217,000-a-year MP’s gig, they had frequently struggled to pay the rent.
To hear him speak in the rat-a-tat cadence of the student activist he was – and still at heart is, according to the knockers – is to be reminded of how far the Greens have moved away from the party of ecowarriors headed by Bob Brown and Christine Milne.
Chandler-Mather says he is part of a new generation that’s galvanised by climate change and “a broader set of concerns around economic and material issues”. Think the Greens’ policy of putting dental into Medicare, his local campaign against aircraft noise (an early Rudd initiative, ironically) and, of course, the acute shortage of social housing that, he insists, sits behind the problems in the rental and homebuyers’ markets.
Like Marx, whom he read closely at the University of Queensland between making his name as a Labor rebel rouser and stitching together a coalition of activists to take over the students’ union, Chandler-Mather thinks in terms of class struggle. Only now it’s not labour versus capital, but the asset-rich leveraging their advantages over the asset-poor. “One of the best ways to describe class these days is whether you do or don’t own assets,” he tells Inquirer. “And, generally, the ‘don’ts’ fall into the broad layer of people stuck on low wages or in various sorts of precarious work. They rent, they don’t feel like their material prospects are served by either major political party anymore, and they are increasingly drawn to the Greens.”
In case there’s any doubt about which of the big two is in their sights, Chandler-Mather points to a trademark doorknocking drive he recently took a hand in. The Greens wanted to “prove a couple of things to Labor” and geared up in Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ seat of Rankin on Brisbane’s southern fringe. “We wanted to show that we have the capacity to reach those electorates and that a lot of their constituents agreed with our arguments on housing to put pressure on them to come to the table,” he says.
The message is they’re coming for the ALP heartland.
This will be of limited comfort to the Queensland Liberal National Party given its blue-ribbon electorates of Brisbane and Ryan also fell to the Greens in 2022. The loss of Griffith, however, was particularly galling for Team Albo. To the bitter end, Labor professed to be confident that rising star Terri Butler, a certainty for the incoming cabinet, would hold on. The result wasn’t even close: Chandler-Mather romped home on a swing of nearly 11 per cent, leaving Labor with only five of the Sunshine State’s 30 federal seats. If the government is to secure a second term, it must lift that woeful tally at the next election, due by mid-2025.
Not if Chandler-Mather has anything to do with it. He readily admits that Chalmers is safe for the foreseeable future on a hefty margin of 19.1 per cent in Logan-based Rankin. But the mid-range seats of Moreton (9.1 per cent) and Lilley (10.5 per cent) are gettable for the Greens on the basis of the experience in Griffith, he insists. For a start, ALP affirmative action rules threaten to cost veteran MP Graham Perrett his preselection in southside Moreton, even though he lifted the previously marginal seat out of the danger zone last year; an ugly brawl looms.
In northside Lilley, Sports Minister Anika Wells should be cruising after an equally impressive performance in 2022 to improve the buffer she inherited from former treasurer and deputy prime minister Wayne Swan.
But Chandler-Mather says the proportion of voters who rent in Lilley approaches 60 per cent, higher than in Griffith by his count. “Don’t underestimate how engaged people are on housing,” he says.
Or the capacity of the Greens’ tyro to get under Labor’s collective skin. The abuse from the government side has been personal and unrelenting. “Idiot” and “moron” are among the more printable insults hurled at him, and one antagonist stooped particularly low with a gibe about his mother, he says.
The invective ramped up when the Greens handed the government its first significant defeat in parliament in May, blocking the housing bill to fund 30,000 social and affordable homes over five years.
Senate leader and Foreign Minister Penny Wong went after Chandler-Mather, saying he had put his “ego” above women fleeing domestic violence or facing homelessness.
Albanese didn’t miss him, either - then or on Friday when he announced the government would resubmit the legislation to parliament next week, setting up a possible double dissolution election trigger if it is again rejected by the Senate. Fireworks erupted during their verbal altercation in the house on June 21 after the PM purported to quote from an article Chandler-Mather had penned for the socialist journal Jacobin justifying his party’s decision to vote down the HAFF.
Chandler-Mather said he had been verballed.
Jeers erupted from the Labor benches as Albanese slapped down Chandler-Mather’s accusation that he had misled parliament. They were still going at it when the Prime Minister walked out of the chamber. As he passed Chandler-Mather’s desk, the Greens man repeated that Albanese had misrepresented him. “He used quotes from the article so selectively that it almost reversed the meaning,” he says, describing the scene. Albanese shot back: “You’re a joke, mate.”
Both sides are adamant that they have given ground: Labor by agreeing to a one-off $2bn “accelerator” payment to the states to kick start social housing; the Greens by halving their original ask for a $5bn annual outlay, instead of the $500m in guaranteed revenue from the investment fund offered by the government.
“We recognise that we need to negotiate and we can’t get everything we want,” Chandler-Mather says. “So what we’re saying now is, can’t we at least discuss a number between $500m and $2.5bn that will actually make a difference?”
But, politically, wouldn’t it be better if the Greens booked their win on the accelerator payment and came on board? After all, $2bn for social housing is hardly small change.
The trouble is that the cash is not the only sticking point. The Greens won’t budge on their demand for a national rental cap, which Labor rejects as both pointless – it won’t work – and impractical when the states that would have to do the implementation aren’t in line. (NSW is against the idea, while Victoria won’t rule it out.)
“I think Labor are pursuing a strategy where they never want to look like they have made any concessions to the Greens … I think in a bad faith way they pretend that the Greens are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good,” says Chandler-Mather, echoing a often voiced criticism of his party.
“I can’t accept that. Publicly, we’re the only party who in this process, at multiple points, made big concessions on our original demands and keep conceding, actually. It’s almost like we’re negotiating with ourselves.”
The attacks on him have been so venomous that MPs outside the Greens have tried to step in, a rare departure from the usually pitiless cut and thrust of national politics. Queensland LNP stalwart Michelle Landry says she was deeply moved when he burst into tears while being heckled by Labor MPs in parliament – though Chandler-Mather is adamant he was affected by the plight of the constituent at the time, not the name-calling.
In the event, Landry and, separately, Victorian independent Helen Haines went to Speaker Milton Dick to complain about his treatment. “I don’t agree with the Greens’ policies but what the Labor Party was doing to him in the chamber was unacceptable,” Landry says. “They … had the shits about their housing legislation and they were taking it out on him.”
No action was taken by the Speaker, in part because neither MP entered a formal complaint, Dick’s office says. “He’s aware of the issues raised by members and has been monitoring all behaviours in the chamber since,” a spokesperson adds.
Chandler-Mather says Labor has hit back on the doorknocking front by sending teams into Griffith, a sign of its determination to regain the seat. This fight has a long way to go. But make no mistake: Max Chandler-Mather is more than up for it.
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