On Max Chandler-Mather to lead a Green think tank, but is it a Panzer?

As Max Chandler-Mather takes over at the Green Institute and Adam Bandt steps in at the Australian Conservation Foundation is this when the environment movement can finally get properly organised?

Even The Australian called former Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather a “wunderkind” as he announced on Wednesday that, after being dumped by the electorate of Griffith at last year’s federal election, this environmental and social firebrand is back. And appropriately, as the new head of the think tank, the Green Institute.

It’s close enough to the action to give him another shot at the polls when the time is right.

The thing is, Chandler-Mather is the kind of character that’s right for the zeitgeist. If the PM Anthony Albanese found him annoying thanks to the MP’s unfettered challenges in parliament to Labor Party policies, so be it. If some found his support for unions when a particular union was being pilloried, bad luck.

Chandler-Mathers is not one to hide behind the niceties of polite society. But at a time like this, it’s good to know some people at least will stick their neck out.

What impressed most was the day a journalist asked him why he didn’t own a home now that he was a relatively well paid pollie. Because he gave away $50,000 a year of his own money to fund food for people in his electorate, it turned out.

Globally, it’s a time of extremes.

No one needs another list of dramas rebounding daily to agree, but a simple look at the politics taking root abroad and at home raises the alarm that the erstwhile polite sociopaths and racists now feel enabled to speak their minds, no matter how damaging to others.

Extremes breed extremes. Which is why the US President Trump has not only done a bad thing – and so tragic for so many people. His crazed Romper Stomper ascendency has spawned a wake-up call to otherwise sleepy heads complacent in their middle class or educated comfort that this planet and this rule of law are not going to save themselves.

Nothing is certain, nothing is guaranteed.

In the US, the Trump backlash gave rise to the leftist Zohran Mamdani swiping the mayoral race in New York.

In the UK, the extravagant Reform Party, whose leader Nigel Farage led Brexit, possibly the UK’s lowest point since the Romans invaded, has also taken a knock, with a big recent and surprising upswing for the Greens led by Zack Polanski.

Now that these hardline right wing trends have finally wended their way to sleepy Oz and are roaring for a political win, it’s time for our own backlash.

Right now, Chandler-Mather is playing his cards nice and safe, concentrating on social equity issues.

In his first official email as executive director of the institute, he used all the right catchphrases to capture attention-deficit voters:

Today, we’re re-launching the institute with a new mission: to help build the movement we need to replace establishment politics and win a better future.

Let’s be real, with the Liberals fading away, Labor is now the main party of big business and vested interests, and no amount of pressure or negotiation will get them to change.

That means if we want to win real change, then we need to replace both Labor and the Liberals and keep One Nation away from power.

That’s going to require a massive movement, and a clear, bold vision that speaks to the hopes and desires of the millions of people screwed over by the political and economic establishment. And the Green Institute is going to help us get there.

His uncompromising stance on more equitable housing is the kind of rare authentic politics we need. It can break through the cynicism that pervades an electorate weary from doomscrolling and being trolled by their sitting pollies. One thing probably leads to the other.

Chandler-Mather is well aware that the timing is well suited to characters such as his.

He can see that the gap left by the big political parties will be filled by One Nation, because they don’t “thumb their noses at the concerns of everyday voters” unless a new breed of thinkers’ steps in.

The interests behind fossil fuels and their uses in buildings, roads, transport and cities overall are highly aligned, if not identical. Unfortunately, the connections are far more opaque and buried in free market, neoliberal ideologies that dominate the property industry and its associates.

He told The Guardian he would use the new full-time role to “organise thousands of volunteers to conduct a major survey of economic and social life around the country, based on the success of his own door-knocking campaign in Queensland”.

But in our view, it would be excellent if his ambition could be refined – or expanded –to also focus on the key environmental concerns on which the Greens were originally founded.

So that even though he rightly wants people to “thrive” not “just survive”, they’ll all have a safe place to come home to.

Other big shifts under way

The problem is, as we’ve often noted, that the green built environment movement is dominated by industry and aligned interests, not environmental interests.

At the broader green level, the many environmentally focused groups that abound are disparate and far from aligned – for a lot of reasons. This breaks up impact and is in dire contrast to the unified and amplified voice of groups for big business or mining, for instance.

Sure, these groups are better funded. But imagine if the green funding were pooled and there was a united front with one voice to the government!

Again, we might just have an inkling that this could soon change.

In yet another unintended consequence of the Greens’ unexpected rout at the last election, its former leader, Adam Bandt, has taken over leadership of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

This is an organisation with just a few thousand members but a massive 500,000 donation pool.

His plans? To use his significant political nous to make the ACF a far more effective environmental movement, able to counter the force of big business. Coal and gas are his clear number one targets, but we want to put the case for him to take on the built environment sector as well.

The interests behind fossil fuels and their uses in buildings, roads, transport and cities overall are highly aligned, if not identical. Unfortunately, the connections are far more opaque and buried in free market, neoliberal ideologies that dominate the property industry and its associates.

It’s immensely frustrating that with the massive amount of carbon this sector emits, we have no clearly defined group campaigning solely for environmental performance as an absolute, not the relative (industry) performance that currently dominates the narrative.

Who knows, maybe now with a well resourced green think tank and an army of half a million donors that might be tapped at the right time, we might finally be able to switch that narrative.