They helped the constituents of Griffith deal with its consequences. He and his people didn’t just talk about climate change. He trounced the Labor incumbent, Terri Butler, taking 60 per cent of the vote after preferences. The anecdote may be self-serving, but it helps explain why, last Saturday, Chandler-Mather won Griffith for the first time. It involved a fair bit of letting go from my perspective.” And he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that a lot.’ ” “We empowered a team of primarily younger people … allowing them to take the reins and lead a campaign.
“A council officer in his rapid response vehicle – it literally said ‘rapid response’ on the side of it – pulled up in Norman Park … and leaned out of the car and asked this resident I was speaking to, ‘You guys need any help?’ And the resident said, ‘Oh, no, that’s fine. And we got big lines for that.” One of his favourite moments, he says, was several days into the clean-up. Every evening we’d have a barbecue serving burgers and snags and fruit and veggies. “For three or four days we were going house to house, cleaning things out. We developed a whole roster of, you know, these houses need cleaning, these houses need food, these houses need packs of ice dropped off with Eskys because their electricity is not working,” he says. “We put out the call and got all of these Gernis and gloves and materials … and then we sent out our doorknocking teams into areas that had been flooded and assessed need. Then came the Brisbane flood in February, and again Chandler-Mather put out the word to his several hundred volunteers. “And a lot of that stuff was sourced from the community garden and our volunteer network.”
“So we letter-boxed a lot of public housing in the electorate, just letting people know that if they were in iso, or doing it tough, we could drop off a free box of food, along with some toilet paper and other essentials,” Chandler-Mather says. It was a symbolic gesture in support of his party’s demand that the land be bought back by the state and used for affordable housing, a new school and green space.īy the time the Omicron wave hit, the garden was producing fresh fruit and vegetables. Last year, in response to plans for a private developer to build 855 high-end homes on former Defence department land in Bulimba in the electorate, Chandler-Mather enlisted the aid of some 100 supporters to build a community garden on the route of the proposed four-lane access road. After the 2020 state poll, he and his team didn’t stand down they kept knocking on doors.īut they did more than that, too. The party’s candidate, Max Chandler-Mather, was the strategist behind the campaign for the state seat of South Brisbane in 2020, and before that for another state seat, Maiwar, in 2017, and before that for a local government ward within Griffith in 2016.
The Greens’ campaign for the Brisbane seat of Griffith began long before Scott Morrison drove to government house to call the election.