Leadership Quote by Adam Bandt

A slogan like this works because it refuses the polite language of “housing supply” and “market adjustments” and instead names villains and remedies in plain terms. “Build homes people can afford” is a quiet indictment of decades of policy that treated housing as an asset class first and shelter second. It also sidesteps the developer-friendly trick of calling anything “new” automatically “affordable.” Bandt’s phrasing implies affordability is a design constraint, not a happy accident of trickle-down supply.

“Cap rent increases” is the sharper blade. It signals impatience with the idea that renters should simply wait for long-run construction to cool prices while their paychecks get eaten month by month. The subtext is political alignment: renters as a bloc, not a footnote, and landlords as a regulated interest, not a protected one. It’s also a bid to move the Overton window in Australia, where rent controls are often treated as taboo or economically reckless.

Context matters: Bandt leads the Australian Greens, a party built on translating moral urgency (climate, inequality) into concrete policy fights. Housing is the perfect pressure point: it’s both a cost-of-living crisis and a generational fracture, with younger voters locked out of ownership and older voters insulated by rising property values. The line is engineered for that divide. It offers immediate relief (caps) and a structural promise (build), framing the crisis as solvable if government stops acting like a bystander. Critics will call it simplistic; politically, that’s the point. It’s a demand to pick a side.