By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
Social media celebrity and fighter for the rights of renters everywhere Jordan van den Lamb is coming for federal parliament.
The activist known as purplepingers, and for his shitrentals.org website – where renters post unflattering reviews of landlords and crummy rental properties – will attempt to translate his social media following into votes.
Jordan van den Lamb aka purplepingers.Credit: Wayne Taylor
Do 200,000 TikTok followers translate into a Senate seat? Time will tell.
Van den Lamb, 28, is a lawyer and federal public servant who lives in Melbourne and vows to take on the “aspirational ruling class”.
His campaign literature states: “He also makes silly little videos on TikTok and uses his platform to passionately contribute to political discourse (and Married at First Sight – equally important).” Sounds peak CBD to us.
“The landlords in parliament aren’t doing anything about the issues that are affecting regular people,” van den Lamb told CBD.
“I don’t want to do this but there is a lack of will with the major parties to do anything.
“People are angry and faced with a massive power imbalance.”
He will stand for the Victorian Socialists and describes his style as “dry and not beating around the bush”.
This will put him in direct competition with federal parliament’s current best-known renter, the Greens MP for Griffith Max Chandler-Mather (known as “hyphen” to those in the government). But he only has 68,000 Instagram followers to van den Lamb’s 68,300. JVDL damned the Greens with faint praise, telling CBD: “I like their policies. I don’t think they go far enough. My party has a policy that we don’t preselect landlords.”
Which absolutely cannot be said of some other Greens, including deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi and Tasmania Senator Nick McKim, who each own multiple properties.
POISONED CHALICE
Funnily enough, there aren’t too many takers for one of the most cursed jobs in Australian politics.
We’re talking, of course, about the state director gig at the NSW Liberals, which is now vacant after Richard Shields was dumped amid the fallout from the division’s disastrous failure to get its local-council election forms in on time.
Party affairs manager Wilson Chessell took on Shields’ old job in an acting capacity until Monday. About 2pm that afternoon, state executive members received an email from president Don Harwin announcing his recommendation to appoint Dorina Ilievska, Shields’ deputy, as interim acting state director. State executive members were given just three hours to mull it over, with a vote due by 5pm.
“While I regret the short response time allocated for this ballot, it is necessary in the circumstance to ensure that the role of interim acting state director does not become vacant,” the Don wrote.
Now while Shields took the fall for the council debacle, Ilievska and Chessell, who’d been delegated the task of doing the paperwork, both survived, and have inexplicably risen during the party’s weeks of chaos.
Ilievska even jetted off on a pre-planned overseas holiday days after the debacle unfolded because Euro summer waits for nobody. On Monday she was back to become the second acting state director in as many weeks, in which role she’ll remain until the Liberals can find someone permanent.
Given it took six months after last year’s state election for the Liberals to replace former state director Chris Stone, we could be waiting a while.
DINING IN
We reckon there are few lawyers in Australia as well-connected as the father-son duo Mark and Jeremy Leibler of Arnold Bloch Leibler fame.
“The Powerbroker” Mark Leibler.Credit: Elke Meitzel
Mark is, after all, nicknamed “the Powerbroker”, a moniker that is hardly in jest. The firm’s 70th-anniversary bash in Melbourne last year drew a veritable who’s who of the nation’s political and business elite, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese giving a speech as guest of honour.
Meanwhile Jeremy, who runs the Zionist Federation of Australia, led a delegation to Israel this year that included former Victorian premier Dan Andrews and Liberal senator Dave Sharma, as CBD reported.
It’s no surprise, then, that the pair scored a private dinner with Albo at The Lodge in June, documents released under Freedom of Information confirm, although sadly neither party would enlighten us further on the menu, nor the topics of discussion.
But Leibler snr seems to take a fairly ordinary view of politicians, telling this masthead last year: “The other thing that one has to understand about politicians is that it is all about power.
“And the one consistent stream which runs through what politicians do and say is the desire to remain in power, which means winning elections at all costs. And, very often, the loser in all of this is principles.”
So we can’t imagine him being too awestruck by a date at The Lodge. But we doubt he repeated such sentiments to Albo’s face. He’s far too charming for that.
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