On a sticky autumn Saturday, three weeks out from the election, Greens candidate Max Chandler-Mather is going door-to-door, talking to voters in the southern Brisbane suburb of Carina.
Many people greet him with a twinkle of recognition. One woman offers him a glass of water. Harsha, a Sri Lankan-Australian, tells Chandler-Mather he’s the first candidate or local member for the seat of Griffith to knock on his door in the 20 years he’s lived at the property.
Chandler-Mather’s campaign has become the biggest in the Australian Greens’ history – the party has poured an unprecedented amount of money and time into a seat Labor has held for all but two of the past 45 years. This is the electorate that sent former prime minister Kevin Rudd to Canberra and is now home to Labor’s environment spokesperson, Terri Butler, who holds the seat with a 2.9% margin.
In recent years, the Greens have won seats on the Brisbane city council, and claimed the state electorate south of the Brisbane river, where Griffith is based. That foothold has underpinned a very unconventional sort of campaign.
Most outsider candidates spend their time fomenting a mood for change. Instead, Chandler-Mather is acting like the incumbent, organising local forums and, with volunteers, planting community gardens and handing out Covid-19 care packages. After the Brisbane floods, they helped people clean out their homes and dropped off supplies.
When he hits the doors – he estimates they’ve knocked on 80,000 over 14 months – Chandler-Mather says he approaches the interaction as a sort of “social work”, rather than asking for a vote.
“The theory underlying our campaign strategies … is that there is a growing disillusionment with politics – that people feel like politics is now completely disconnected from their lives,” Chandler-Mather says.
“The way to rebuild that relationship and give them hope [that] something can change is to reach them in their homes.”
The seat of Griffith covers inner-city suburbs on the south side of the Brisbane River, from the Gateway Bridge to Dutton Park.
While the Greens have strongholds in West End and parts of South Brisbane, as you move further away from the CBD, more Labor and LNP pockets appear.
To bolster their chances at victory, the Greens have attempted to build a grassroots community campaign that centres on meaningful relationships, says University of Queensland political scientist Dr Glenn Kefford.
“It’s a set of techniques which have been used by the Greens in Queensland for about six years now, going back to Jon Sri’s election to the council in 2016,” Kefford says.
“The academic literature on this says the best way to persuade voters is to have a one-on-one conversation with them … [and] they’ve pretty much not stopped door-knocking since the last federal election.”
But Kefford says the Greens are mistaken if they think victory will be easy.
“Terri Butler’s team are out on the doors as well and they also use other practices like phone banking. When you’ve got a relatively well-liked local candidate, it does make it quite challenging,” he says.
Kefford says as time’s gone on, the electoral contest has shifted in Labor’s favour, making it tougher for the Greens to win the seat.
“What we see from the polls is that it looks like Labor’s primary is going to increase … I think it’s going to be very hard for the Greens to take Griffith, given the greater contest that’s playing out,” he says.
“In an election where the government looks likely to lose and you have a pretty unpopular prime minister … they might go, ‘well, I really want to get rid of Morrison, so I’ll vote Labor in the House’.”
Labor was outpolled on first-preference votes in the 2019 election – attracting 31% of the vote compared with the LNP’s 41% – but ultimately retained the seat thanks to the Greens vote, which reached 23%.
Butler was contacted for comment. She told the ABC this week that she is “working hard to retain the trust of the people of this electorate”.
“I never take this seat for granted – it’s always a tight contest,” Butler told the ABC. “It’s been the case for me, it’s been the case for Kevin Rudd.”
As pre-polling kicks off, Chandler-Mather remains optimistic about his chances. He’s confident that he’s on the cusp of victory, with few votes needed to secure the “positive change” he’s been promising voters.
Chandler-Mather says he’s won a surprising amount of support from former Liberal and One Nation voters who want to see climate action and agree with getting dental into Medicare. “They’ve come over to us because they finally heard a platform that represents them,” he says.
“The scale of this campaign and the degree to which it’s embedded in local communities is … a scale beyond anything the Greens have done before,” Chandler-Mather says.
“This electorate is increasingly becoming a fierce race between Labor and the Greens, and the Liberals are going to almost certainly get blown away here.”
