2022-11-25
I’m only here because of our incredible movement of volunteers and organisers who gave up countless weekends to campaign, and I’m deeply humbled by the trust and support of tens of thousands of Griffith residents.
By Max Chandler-Mather
After an intense couple of months since the election, my electorate office is now fully established and we’re starting to get cracking on a number of national and local projects.
First off I just want to say: I’m forever conscious that I’m only here because of our incredible movement of volunteers and organisers who gave up countless weekends to campaign, and I’m deeply humbled by the trust and support of tens of thousands of Griffith residents.
Town halls
For the past month we have been running an ambitious project in community consultation with seven town hall style community meetings across the electorate. In tandem with these town halls we’ve been running an electorate-wide community survey. All up, we expect to have over 500 people attend the town halls and over 2,000 people complete the survey.
The town hall meetings are broken into two sections. In the first section I give an overview of some of our local and federal priorities, with a particular focus on housing and climate change. The entire second half of the meeting is devoted to audience questions and feedback. This section in particular has proved incredibly valuable with both great engaged questions, but also often people giving really powerful personal stories about their own lives. By way of example:
A single mum in her 40s already spends over 40 percent of her income on rent. She said she was resigned to never being able to afford to buy her own home. This is despite the fact that she works incredibly hard, dropping off her kids at before school care at 6.30am so she can get to work early. She made the point that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the same situation, and in the next few years there could be a new tidal wave of homeless women in their 40s and 50s. In one of the wealthiest countries on earth, this is a disgrace.
Free breakfasts and mutual aid
We are currently in the process of preparing to launch our first free school breakfast program at a local public school in Griffith, and I’m really bloody excited about it. From next year we plan to expand the free school breakfast program to other schools across the electorate.
This is part of a broader project of ‘mutual aid’ my office is pursuing and includes other little programs like our free food pantry. It also includes bigger projects like building the volunteer infrastructure needed to provide direct assistance to residents in the event of future floods.
Other local projects
I’ve been enjoying getting involved with the local community and helping to run different campaigns. My team is running campaigns to stop unsustainable flight noise pollution, to save the East Brisbane State School and Raymond Park from Olympics development, to buy back community land, and to establish a new public park in flood prone areas.
Housing and homelessness
Australia is experiencing one of the worst housing affordability crises in decades, and it seems like everyone except banks and big property developers are ending up worse off. Young families are locked out of buying their first home, homeowners have had their mortgages increased by hundreds of dollars a month, and more than 116,000 people are left homeless each night.
I have launched two related housing campaigns. The first was a national call for a two-year rent freeze followed by ongoing rent controls, where rents can only increase by 2 percent every two years. I’ve since worked with state-based Greens housing spokespeople around the country to help push state-based calls for rent controls including in Queensland, Victoria and NSW. This has also involved helping to host a series of renter and housing forums across the country, including in Brisbane, Victoria and future forums planned in Canberra and Sunshine Coast.
Recently I asked the Parliamentary Library how much extra rent was paid by renters last year. I was shocked to find out that renters forked out a whopping $7 billion extra, or about $3,000 per household. Under our plan to freeze rents for two years, the average renter would be able to save at least $3,000 per year. With the cost of groceries, petrol and healthcare increasing, an extra $3,000 would go a really long way to help tackle the cost of living crisis.
The other housing campaign is our push to substantially improve Labor’s Housing Australia Future Fund. This is Labor’s housing plan that they claim will see 20,000 public and community homes and 10,000 affordable homes built over five years. To put that into context, Australia currently has a shortage of 520,000 public homes and that shortage will grow by 70,000 over the next five years. This means Labor’s plan will literally see the housing crisis get worse.
It’s possible that the Greens will be in the balance of power on the bill Labor needs to pass to establish the Housing Australia Future Fund. So the Federal Party Room has empowered me and Adam Bandt to go into negotiations with the government. We are pushing for four main improvements:
- Build 275,000 well designed public, and community homes over the next five years;
- Introduce a national two-year rent freeze as part of new national tenancy standards;
- Invest $5 billion in maintenance and upgrades for existing public housing, to improve accessibility, energy efficiency, and ensure better heating and cooling; and
- Introduce new minimum architectural, energy efficiency and accessibility standards for all new public, community and affordable housing.
You probably saw Labor’s “one million homes” announcement. If you want to read why exactly this is a completely fake announcement, you can read a little tweet thread I did on it here.
The short analysis is: Over the past five years the private sector built just under one million homes, so Labor announcing that under their plans the private sector will build one million homes over five years from 2024 is a complete joke. These homes would have been built anyway.
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