Election 2025: Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather fights for his party’s future in seat of Griffith

Outspoken Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather should be as safe as houses in his Brisbane seat of Griffith. He’s not.

Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather out doorknocking in Griffith. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

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This time it’s personal – personal for Greens tyro Max Chandler-Mather, whose rise to national prominence can be measured in the vitriol sent his way.

Personal for Anthony Albanese, who would love nothing more than to show him the door after their clashes inside and outside parliament. For other, eminently practical reasons, Chandler-Mather’s division of Griffith sits high on Labor’s target list.

And personal for the hard-nosed ALP and LNP machine bosses who were caught napping when the brash young MP ambushed them at the 2022 election, orchestrating a windfall gain of three Brisbane seats for the Greens, including his own on the inner southside.

“The main thing that has changed is that more people recognise me,” said Chandler-Mather, 33, taking a break from doorknocking on a steamy weekday afternoon. “And that’s really lovely, in the main. It says to me people are taking notice of what we’re doing for them and for the country.”

Chandler-Mather in conversation with a voter in his Brisbane seat of Griffith. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

The outcome in Griffith, Kevin Rudd’s former seat now with a notionally safe 10.5 per cent margin for the Greens party, will say a lot about the coming federal poll.

If Chandler-Mather is returned – and despite his seemingly comfortable buffer that’s no certainty – it will reinforce the lesson Adam Bandt has driven home for election after election in his leafy bastion of Melbourne: once the Greens get in, they are incredibly difficult to dislodge, especially for Labor.

It will also show that Chandler-Mather was on to more than Scott Morrison’s unpopularity and the perplexing failure of the teals to run in metropolitan Brisbane at the last election as well as on May 3. The Greens’ housing spokesman will be emplaced as a viable and possibly irresistible alternative to Bandt as leader, signalling an even more radical lurch to the left by the minority party.

But if he loses, you can expect that his colleagues, Stephen Bates in the neighbouring seat of Brisbane, and Elizabeth Watson-Brown in Ryan in the inner west, will also be cleaning out their desks. Chandler-Mather’s Labor opponent, Renee Coffey, will be vindicated: the voters contracted “buyer’s remorse” about electing Greens. This would constitute a reality check for the minority party nationally.

For now, Chandler-Mather professes to have eyes only for what’s ahead of him in Griffith over the closing three weeks of the campaign. The battle is certainly willing. Labor has pumped resources and precious prime ministerial time into Coffey’s campaign. Albanese on Sunday mounted his second major rally in the electorate this year to launch a $2.3bn plan to subsidise home solar energy system batteries.

Campaigning in Cairns on Thursday in the LNP-held seat of Leichhardt, another Labor priority, the Prime Minister took a not-so-veiled swipe at Chandler-Mather, saying: “Renee Coffey is a star. She’s been knocking on doors, she supports housing while the Greens were holding up new housing in the electorate.”

Yet, curiously, it took until this week for the Liberal National Party to preselect a candidate, pharmaceutical researcher Anthony Bishop. The Australian understands the initial pick, a person of Jewish extraction tapped to capitalise on criticism that the Greens’ embrace of the Palestinians’ cause in Gaza is anti-Semitic, was scratched by the constitutional ban on dual nationals entering parliament. The LNP declined to comment, citing confidentiality around its preselection processes.

But there’s no doubt this has played into Chandler-Mather’s hands. The 2022 result in Griffith exposes the limitation of a two-party-preferred determination when a strong third candidate is in the mix. He won on a primary vote of 34.6 per cent, with the LNP second on 30.8 per cent and Labor incumbent Terri Butler, a promising frontbencher, out of the contest on 28.9 per cent. When her preferences were distributed, they inflated Chandler-Mather’s 2PP margin to 11.1 per cent over Labor and 10.5 per cent over the LNP. Instead of becoming a cabinet minister in the Albanese government, Butler found herself looking for a new job.

Better, then, to think of Griffith as a three-cornered contest, with the booby prize going to the candidate coming third. This is where Chandler-Mather is more vulnerable than the recognised parameters suggest. This time around, a 2.1 per cent shift in the LNP vote to Labor would send him packing on LNP preferences. Alternatively, a 3.9 per cent swing in the Greens’ primary vote to Labor would enable Coffey to finish ahead of Chandler-Mather and defeat the LNP’s man, Bishop, on Greens preferences.

Labor candidate Renee Coffey with Anthony Albanese. Picture: Dan Peled / NewsWire

As would be expected, Chandler-Mather insisted he was taking nothing for granted. The ground game that did the trick in 2022, a Max special that ran across inner Brisbane, with squads of Greens doorknockers blitzing the target electorates, is in full swing again, though there is muttering in the ranks about resources being diverted to Griffith from the campaigns in Brisbane (3.7 per cent) and Ryan (2.6 per cent).

Those two gains were made at the LNP’s expense at the last election, and the blue team wants the seats back. (The LNP campaign believes Bishop can top the primary vote in Griffith, despite the late start.) The “narrow path” to victory for both Albanese and Peter Dutton is more like a tightrope, putting a priority on gains in Queensland. Labor holds only five of the state’s 30 federal seats, and Albanese needs to retain those and add two or three to the tally to help offset anticipated losses in Victoria and NSW.

Leichhardt, up for grabs with the retirement of veteran LNP MP Warren Entsch (3.4 per cent), is a must, accounting for the PM’s presence in Cairns on Thursday. Mischievously, Albanese pointed out that the LNP’s most marginal seat in Queensland was Dickson (1.7 per cent) – held by none other than Dutton. Labor likes its chances in outer-metropolitan Longman (3.1 per cent) and will push hard in the seat of Brisbane.

There, the LNP is running a strong candidate in former MP Trevor Evans, considered unlucky to lose in 2022 to Bates. It’s fair to say the Greens MP has been well and truly outshone by Chandler-Mather, as is the case with Watson-Brown in Ryan. Her seat, taking in some of Brisbane’s wealthiest postcodes, is ranked by the LNP as its best prospect, followed by Brisbane and Labor-held Blair, west of Ipswich (5.2 per cent).

Dutton will need these pick-ups and more, much more, in Victoria, Western Australia, NSW and possibly South Australia, if he is to close in on minority government. Given his patchy campaign performance to date, gaining the net 22 seats required for the Coalition to govern in its own right looks more distant than ever.

Chandler-Mather’s answer is shoe leather. When we meet in Carina Heights, on the southern lip of the electorate, he’s decked out in his doorknocking kit: runners, faded chinos, green T-shirt (of course) and broadbrimmed Bunnings hat.

The street is lined with post-war Housing Commission cottages, baking beneath painted tin roofs. If Chandler-Mather were to buy a house with long-term partner Joanna Horton – they rent in nearby Greenslopes with son Felix, 17 months – this is where they’d take the plunge. “I’d love to buy here,” he said. “It’s more affordable than any other part of my electorate.”

He likes to spend three to four hours doorknocking on weekdays, twice that at the weekend. The key was to take your time, find out what interests the doorknockee, what they’re looking for from their MP or government. Chandler-Mather, who conducts seminars for his volunteers on the dos and don’ts of engaging with voters, calls it the Greens’ secret weapon. He routinely spends 15 minutes on a conversation before moving on. What was his strike rate? He looked puzzled. Did he get many doors slammed in his face?

Liberal candidate Anthony Bishop.

“Oh, good question,” he said. “If I have, say, 15 conversations, maybe one or two people will tell me to bugger off. There will be varying levels of support for the Greens in those conversations but I’ve been doorknocking now for almost a decade … and I can count on one hand the number of really hostile interactions I’ve had.”

He hopes to have personally doorknocked 10,000 homes by election day, a formidable ask. The pace is picking up in Griffith. The Greens have 100 trained canvassers crisscrossing the seat and a dedicated team of letterboxers, who can blanket an entire electorate in a week. Red-shirted Labor volunteers are thick on the ground.

Now that it has a candidate, the LNP campaign is also set to fire. Advance Australia, the political right’s answer to Labor-supporting GetUp!, is conspicuous in Griffith, attempting to reprise the impact it had at last October’s Queensland election, where the Greens lost one of their two state MPs in the seat of South Brisbane, bounded by the federal division, and at February’s Prahran by-election in Melbourne, won by the Liberals at Greens expense.

Advance executive director Matthew Sheahan said the Greens would be targeted in a $7m federal election spend on billboards, social media and TV streaming advertising – and Chandler-Mather “in particular deserved attention”.

Sheahan said: “Today’s Greens are extremists: they’re openly advocating for drug decriminalisation, violent pro-Palestine protests and wide-open borders during a housing crisis. The Greens are not who they used to be, and we want every Australian to know that.”

Chandler-Mather, for his part, is not taking a step back. He rejected reports that he came under internal pressure to tone down his rhetoric after the Greens vote sagged in key head-to-head contests against Labor in inner-Brisbane seats at the state election. “We of course learn from every election, but at a federal level we certainly haven’t changed our focus from housing, cost of living and climate,” he said.

“And I definitely haven’t been pressured by anyone in the party. We’re very much a team and it just doesn’t work like that.”

As for his notorious appearance at a CFMEU rally in Brisbane last August, where signs depicting Albanese as a Nazi were brandished by members of the rogue construction union in one of his many flashpoints with Labor, Chandler-Mather said he was standing up against the government’s move to force the CFMEU into administration on a point of principle.