Revenge of the renters
Max Chandler-Mather didn't own a suit until last year. Now he's in Parliament, and leading the Greens' charge to outflank Labor on housing.
When the Greens won their first seat on Brisbane City Council in 2016, no one in Labor was worried about the federal consequences.
The conventional wisdom was that the Greens would always outflank Labor in the inner-city on asylum seekers and climate, but that they weren’t a threat to Labor’s working class base in the city.
Over the next six years, the Greens won another council ward, then-deputy premier Jackie Trad’s seat of South Brisbane, before last year winning three federal seats including Brisbane and Ryan from the Liberal Party and Griffith from Labor.
A common denominator in most of those areas - the two council wards, the state seat and two federal electorates - was that around half of the voters were renters.
