Meet Max Chandler-Mather: the man getting under Anthony Albanese's skin

We are sitting in his office in Parliament House - sparsely decorated, except for a Greens' "Rent Freeze Now" poster in the front window. Chandler-Mather, having just returned from question time wearing a crisp suit, looks like any other politician in the building (minus a decade or so) except for his worn leather shoes.

Chandler-Mather spends a lot of time on his feet. The member for Griffith - who ousted Labor rising star Terri Butler with a 10.9 per cent swing last year - has become known for his grassroots tactics. He and his party say they knocked on 90,000 doors in the campaign to turn the former Labor seat Green. This year Chandler-Mather - now his party's housing and homelessness spokesperson - turned his methods against a new foe: the government's proposed Housing Australia Future Fund, and one of Labor's key election promises.

Despite being only 15 months into office, the first-time MP has quickly become one of the biggest - and most polarising - figures in federal politics, commanding a level of attention and power most shadow ministers, let alone minor party newcomers, would dream of.

Ending up at the centre of a national debate

With the Coalition flat-out refusing to back Labor's housing package, and the Greens in the balance of power in the Senate, the minor party and Chandler-Mather are using this as an opportunity to wedge the government on an issue their young voter base cares about: renters' rights. In a shock move in June, the Greens delayed a Senate vote on the bill, saying they wouldn't pass it unless the Prime Minister put $1 billion on the table at national cabinet to incentivise a two-year rent freeze and ongoing rent increase caps across the states and territories.

And so, the 32-year-old has found himself at the centre of a national debate and one of the biggest legislative stoushes of recent years. While crossbenchers vie for the occasional television spot, the Greens spokesperson makes regular appearances to discuss micro-developments in the parties' ongoing housing battle. Reporters swarm his press conferences during sitting weeks, hoping for an update.

"It's felt like you're in a campaign," Chandler-Mather tells me in his office, looking back on the year.

But with attention comes attacks. People crowd the comment section on his social media accounts, cursing his dual war against the homeless community and landlords. A pro-Labor Facebook page recently posted a side-by-side of him and Margaret Thatcher, comparing their likeness. In Parliament, MPs from across the aisle have complained to the speaker about Labor politicians allegedly bullying Chandler-Mather.

He even appears to have gotten under the Prime Minister's skin. Back in June - as Labor licked its wounds following the Greens' Senate vote shutdown - Albanese stood up and read out lines in Parliament from an article Chandler-Mather had written for Jacobin about the housing debate; lines, he said, that exposed the Greens' "political motive" over stalling the HAFF. More recently, leaked audio - apparently of a speech Albanese gave at a National Labor Left dinner - heard the Prime Minister dub Chandler-Mather's tactics as "Maoist".

"I think it's frustrating in a way because some of the personal attacks, at some point, sort of force [you] to defend yourself, but you'd much rather be focusing on housing and the issues," Chandler-Mather says.

"You're sort of left in this funny space of not wanting to defend yourself too much because it plays into that frame that this is some sort of personal thing, which it's not," he says, adding "it has felt relentless".

But while it's only his first term in office, Chandler-Mather is not some political newcomer. He's a seasoned campaigner, who played a crucial role in the Greens' rapid rise.

Chandler-Mather's introduction to politics began at the University of Queensland, where he joined Young Labor at his parents' encouragement and "under the assumption that you can sort of change the party from the inside". The romance was short-lived. He quit the party after working in a Labor-aligned trade union call centre (something he describes as a "deeply demoralising experience") and around the time the Gillard government reopened refugee detention on Manus and Nauru.

"I had got the sense that far from you being able to change the Labor Party from the inside, it - as an institution - seemed entirely geared towards breaking and changing people and forcing them to sort of compromise their own values and principles," he says.

After graduating, he landed a job as an organiser at the National Tertiary Education Union with the help of his history professor and NTEU Queensland branch president, Andrew Bonnell. Bonnell tells me over email he got an "early look at Max's political organising and campaigning skills" back in 2012, when Chandler-Mather helped lead protests against LNP students' alleged manipulation of the student union elections; protests which Bonnell says "reminded some older staff of the anti-Vietnam protest movement for size".

Chandler-Mather was enjoying work and thinking about getting some articles published for his honours thesis when his friend Jonathan Sriranganathan (Sri) approached him with a proposition: to manage his Greens campaign for local council.

Sri and Chandler-Mather met during university ("probably at some house party," Sri tells me on the phone), and got to know each other working on the campaign to fix UQ's elections and editing the student paper. "I think I once organised an education stunt where I got his band The Mouldy Lovers to do a guerilla performance in the grass so we could get a crowd there and then flyer them about free university education," Chandler-Mather laughs. "We had a bit of fun at uni."

The year was 2015 and the Greens only had one representative across all three levels of Parliament in Queensland (federal senator Larissa Waters). The state had largely been known as a conservative heartland - the home of Pauline Hanson, Campbell Newman and Matt Canavan. The Greens' chances of winning the inner-south Brisbane Gabba ward looked slim. "We were told it was impossible because we needed a 14 per cent swing," Chandler-Mather says.

But Sri - who had just run and failed to win a seat in state parliament - was able to convince Chandler-Mather to come on board and join a group of young people hoping to reshape the way the Greens did politics.

"I think until that time, the Greens had increasingly been seen as closer to the political establishment," Sri explains. "And, I think, quite a few of us thought it would be better for the party to go back to its roots and embrace the fact that we're system outsiders rather than pretending to be system insiders."

The team had seven months and around $15,000 to pull off a win. They organised parties and gigs under people's houses. Sri helped stage protest actions. But he says Chandler-Mather's biggest contribution was putting "a stronger and more systematic focus on field campaigning". Door-knocking.

Chandler-Mather says he had a theory: "The vast majority of people are disconnected from politics ... and often will vote because they feel like there's no other option, or they don't feel like they're particularly listened to by anyone."

"But," his voice grows more animated, "if you can actually get to someone's door and have a proper one-on-one conversation and hear them out, one of those conversations can be persuasive. But if you do it at scale and have thousands of them and you can train volunteers to do that, that might work."

It did work. Sri won in 2016 with a 13.8 per cent swing. Chandler-Mather was catapulted to state strategist for the party. The Greens gained a state MP in 2017, and another in 2020. Chandler-Mather himself ran for Griffith in 2019, securing a 6.9 per cent swing but coming up short. All of this laid the groundwork, though, for the 2022 federal election, where the party picked up three lower house seats and an extra senator in Queensland. Pundits declared a "Greenslide".

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Sri says South Brisbane - with its history of community organising - provided a fertile ground for their campaign style to succeed. Chandler-Mather, too, brushes away any credit for the party's success, saying it was the Greens' state director - Kitty Carra - who saw what they were able to achieve in the Gabba ward and ran with it.

Still, talking in his office, it's easy to see how Chandler-Mather wins over voters. He rarely breaks eye contact. He talks optimistically about the future, but with a verve that makes his vision feel convincing. Even sitting in an armchair, he can't help but move his hands as if choreographing a speech.

But he's also shrewd and self-effacing. A few years ago, when he was state strategist, I knew people in the party who jokingly referred to themselves as Maxists - fans of the direction Chandler-Mather was helping push the Greens towards. I ask him whether he sees himself leading the party someday. He smiles.

"I'm a first-time MP, so I can absolutely guarantee you that that is not on my mind," he says.

But there are many who aren't fans of the young Green.

There are those in the housing and homelessness sector who consider Chandler-Mather (and his party) as the ones holding hostage the only secure funding they have seen in decades.

Hours after the HAFF vote was delayed in the Senate, leaders from the sector sat commiserating in the parliamentary cafeteria. The sector had spent the 18 months prior preparing thousands of properties to begin construction as soon as the bill was passed. Some of that work was now worthless. As Ivan Simon, chief executive of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Housing Association, told this masthead at the time, the delay meant some people would "sleep through another three or four months before they'll even know they might get some housing support".

Chandler-Mather has accused the government of playing politics in the housing debate. The government reintroduced its housing package at the end of July in the lower house which, if blocked in the Senate a second time, could provide a double dissolution trigger. From Chandler-Mather's perspective, Labor is "trying to turn this into a capital political fight, rather than a serious negotiation and debate about how we tackle the housing crisis". Why? His theory is the government knows their position is "indefensible".

But similar has been said about Chandler-Mather. That he and the Greens are stubbornly blocking one of the most significant reforms for the housing sector and demanding the government do something they know is impossible: freeze rents - a matter that sits firmly with the states and territories. That all of this is just one big campaign for the party to paint Labor as anti-renters, and win more votes at the next election.

Outside of Parliament, the Greens are campaigning: they're door-knocking about housing policy in Labor-held seats, taking to the streets at renters' rights rallies, and handing out cards saying "Rent freeze now. Ask me how" at property inspections. They're branding themselves as the party for renters. When the national cabinet agreed to limit rent increases across the country to one per year, Chandler-Mather came out and denounced the measure as a "sick joke".

Chandler-Mather maintains this is a campaign, but it's eyeing real outcomes, not just political ones.

"Our power in Parliament is only as great as our capacity to organise people on the ground," he says.

"And in this instance, we're doing it because we recognise it's one of the only ways that as a political party and a movement, we can mobilise renters in such a way as it helps us get an outcome on these negotiations."

Door-knocking also lets the party work out whether they are on the right track, Chandler-Mather says, claiming 80 per cent of people opening their doors to the Greens in the Labor-held seat of Ipswich were telling them to keep pressuring the government on rents.

But, I ask, is it worth it if that means jeopardising social and affordable housing?

"Yeah, but the government has touted this as their centrepiece, long-term housing plan. The Housing Australia Future Fund," Chandler-Mather says.

"This is our leverage that we get to use."

In other words: the Greens may not get another chance like this, where the stakes are so high for Labor and where their 11 crossbench senators wield so much power.

Parliament is largely full of two kinds of people - ideologues who want to change the world, and those who run for office because they want power. Perhaps what makes Chandler-Mather so frustrating - and threatening - to some in this building is that he is neither. And both.

Chandler-Mather, himself a renter, speaks passionately about the need to reform tenant rights. He talks about the "visceral experience" of dealing with a bad landlord or staring down another rent increase. Outside of the rental debate, his office runs a free community pantry where people can pick up things like rice and pasta. He currently sacrifices around $12,000 of his parliamentary salary a year so his office can run weekly breakfasts at local schools and provide community grants (the most recent one was awarded to a group welcoming refugees). He's one of the few MPs to turn down Qantas' offer of a Chairman's Lounge membership.

But he also understands he - and the Greens - need power, and is willing to go to lengths to get it. When we talk about the vision he and Sri and the group of young Greens had for the party, I ask him if it was hard to bring the rest of the Greens on board to their new style of doing politics. He tells me no.

"People just really wanted to win," he shrugs.

"And also, once it comes down to it, people want to be empowered to enact change, and you can't enact change without power".

Perhaps the truth is Chandler-Mather is less a politician. He's an organiser.