Greens target Labor in Queensland offensive
The architect of the Greens’ best federal election result in Queensland says not only can the minor party hold the three seats it won in 2022, it will target two more renter-heavy Labor seats.
The architect of the Greens’ best federal election result in Queensland says not only can the minor party hold the three seats it won in 2022, it will target two more renter-heavy Labor seats in Brisbane by arguing that Anthony Albanese’s party has abandoned its working-class base.
In an interview with The Australian, tyro first-term Greens MP, party spokesman for housing and homelessness, and campaign strategist Max Chandler-Mather revealed the party’s three-pronged Queensland re-election pitch – and none of the top policies are environmental.
“The platform that the Greens will be running on at the next federal election, in broad terms, will be a freeze and cap on rent increases; scrapping student debt and HECS debt; and making university free; cracking down on the big supermarkets and making price gouging illegal; and breaking up Coles and Woolworths, and I think that’s a very broad, popular platform,” Mr Chandler-Mather said.
At the last federal election, the Greens won three lower-house seats in Queensland, and had a second senator elected, the party’s best result in the state to date. Mr Chandler-Mather won Griffith from Labor’s Terri Butler (and holds it on a two-party preferred margin of 10.1 per cent, versus the LNP); Stephen Bates won Brisbane from the LNP’s Trevor Evans (Mr Bates has a 3.73 per cent margin); and architect Elizabeth Watson-Brown saw off the LNP’s Julian Simmonds in Ryan (and holds the seat on a margin of 2.65 per cent).
Mr Chandler-Mather said at the next election, the Greens would focus on holding that trio of electorates and targeting two more Labor seats: Lilley (held by Aged Care and Sport Minister Anika Wells on a 10.1 per cent margin) and Moreton (held by Graham Perrett on 9.1 per cent, both two-party preferred versus the LNP).
“It’s not so much about whether or not we can retain these three seats, but whether or not we’ll win another one; Moreton and Lilley are both a big opportunity for us,” he said.
“There’s suburbs in Moreton, like Annerley and Acacia Ridge, where they’re (close to over) 50 per cent renters … the same sort of broad movement-based politics, the same mass doorknocking campaign, the same mutual aid programs we run, we’ll be running in those seats.”
He said the Greens had already started doorknocking in Moreton, focusing on housing affordability, and it felt like talking to voters in the Greens heartland suburb of West End “a few years ago”.
“There’s a lot of people out there who feel like neither the major parties remotely get what is going on in their lives, and who feel completely ignored by the Labor and Liberal Party,” Mr Chandler-Mather said.
The Greens’ 2022 result built on an infrastructure of elected representatives that had been growing steadily in Queensland since Mr Chandler-Mather ran activist and musician Jonathan Sriranganathan’s successful 2015–16 campaign for the Greens’ first Brisbane City Council ward, the Gabba.
At that time, the Greens had only sitting senator Larissa Waters in office in Queensland.
Now, nearly a decade on, the progressive minor party has two senators, three federal MPs, two state MPs, and two Brisbane City councillors.
Mr Chandler-Mather said the expansion of the Greens’ foothold in Brisbane, the capital of a typically conservative state at a federal level, could be attributed to a volunteer-led mass-doorknocking and grassroots-campaigning strategy, as well as broadening the party’s policy platform beyond the environment.
He said the party now had thousands of volunteers, and could knock on as many doors in a week as the early Greens campaigns could knock on in one year.
And while Mr Chandler-Mather is quietly confident of keeping the three seats and adding more, some strategists from the major parties are privately doubtful the Greens can even hold the current electorates.
Labor has just preselected Renee Coffey, the chief executive of Kookaburra Kids, a foundation that helps children whose parents have a mental illness, to take on Mr Chandler-Mather in Griffith, once held by former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
The Australian can reveal former Brisbane LNP MP Trevor Evans is seriously considering another tilt at that seat, while barrister Maggie Forrest is the LNP’s great hope to wrest back the blue-ribbon conservative seat of Ryan from the Greens.
Mr Evans was circumspect on running again: “I haven’t ruled it out”.
A Labor strategist told The Australian that the Greens should prepare for a fight in Brisbane and Ryan, particularly the latter where even political rivals were tipping big things for Ms Forrest, a mother-of-one and former honorary legal adviser for the LNP.
Barrister Ms Forrest, who worked at the International Criminal Court in The Hague for six months after leaving Queensland’s Director of Public Prosecutions, said she was focused on “bread and butter issues” such as lowering the cost of mortgages, reduction in crime, and more effective transport, while saying the sitting Greens MP Ms Watson-Brown wanted to “cut defence spending, cut funding to police, and cut roads”.
Asked how federal Coalition leader Peter Dutton’s major policy – a plan to build seven nuclear reactors, including two in Queensland – was playing in Ryan, Ms Forrest said voters rarely raised the issue.
“When we have been talking about it, I’ve made it clear (to voters) that it’s just one of the options the Coalition is putting on the table,” Ms Forrest said.
“It doesn’t mean no renewables. Renewables are absolutely still part of the mix, but I think if we’re serious about reducing carbon emissions, we need to have all options on the table.”
The Labor strategist said Griffith would be tough for Labor to win back, and that Mr Chandler-Mather was “very active” locally and had a “cult following” in the electorate.
But the ALP strategist said the Greens’ hopes of winning more seats were misguided. “Anika is an incredibly strong local member,” the strategist said.
“It’s a pretty bold prediction (by the Greens) and I also think they tend to go after Labor women, in a way that’s a bit problematic.”
Both major parties are preparing to ramp up the negative campaign against the Greens, a tactic that worked effectively in the recent Brisbane City Council election in March, where Mr Sriranganathan was running for Lord-Mayor and had boasted pre-election the party could overtake Labor as the council’s official opposition.
But ten days out from polling day, the LNP launched an effective and brutal negative campaign against Mr Sriranganathan and the Greens, delivering scratchie mail-outs and multimedia messages to voters in wards where the Greens were threatening to unseat LNP councillors.
Even Labor sources acknowledge the strategy was effective, and credit the negative blitz for the LNP holding off the Greens in the Walter-Taylor ward. Even still, the minor party doubled its council wards, picking up Paddington from the LNP.
A senior LNP source said the party needed to overhaul its federal campaign strategy and structure in Queensland to fight the next election on two fronts: against Labor and the Greens.
“The council campaign was the first time any major party has – in a concerted way – taken on the Greens, and it was incredibly successful,” the LNP source said.
Anthony Albanese was in Queensland for several days over two visits in the past fortnight, announcing Labor’s candidates Madonna Jarrett (returning to contest Brisbane for a second time) and Rebecca Hack in Ryan.
The PM used a visit to a childcare centre in Brisbane with Ms Jarrett to foreshadow the ALP’s willingness to go negative against the Greens, with jab at local MP Mr Bates.
Mr Albanese said Brisbane voters had been “very disappointed with their Greens representative who has blocked Labor’s progressive agenda rather than attempt to improve it or to make a positive difference”.
When asked about the PM’s comments, Mr Chandler-Mather said it showed Mr Albanese was “out of touch”.
“If the Prime Minister, a landlord Prime Minister, announcing a (former) Deloitte exec as their candidate in Brisbane, sounds like the Liberal Party, frankly,” Mr Chandler-Mather said.
Queensland Labor Senator Murray Watt said the ALP was “not giving up on any” of the three federal seats held by the Greens.
“Some of them have had a very long tradition of electing Labor members at different levels of government … we definitely have those Greens seats in our sights. Those members are still new. They haven’t really entrenched themselves, and some of them, we only narrowly lost last time around.”
More Coverage
Two popular premiers are showing the Albanese government how it’s done
It’s a bromance that has invited some ridicule but is fast emerging as one of the most significant partnerships within the Australian Labor Party and one that could have federal implications.
Join me in taking a stand and turning our fortunes around
If we judge a nation on the direction in which it’s going, rather than its past, then Australia, we have a problem. But, it’s one we can fix it if we all agree to be the change we so desperately need.