New Greens leader vows to continue housing fight, targets more state seats

The Greens will torpedo legislation and win more seats off Labor unless the state government tightens restrictions on rental increases in the coming months, the new leader of the Victorian party has warned.

State Greens MPs gathered at Victorian parliament to elect a new leader on Tuesday, two weeks after Samantha Ratnam announced she was stepping down from the leadership and Victoria’s upper house to contest the federal seat of Wills.

The vote to endorse Melbourne MP Ellen Sandell as Ratnam’s replacement happened on the same day the Allan government announced it was breaking a four-year-old promise and ignoring an expert report by not establishing a second safe injecting room in inner Melbourne.

Sandell, who became one of the first Greens MPs to sit in Victoria’s lower house when she won the seat of Melbourne in 2014, labelled Labor’s decision “cowardly” during her first public remarks as leader.

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“What this decision says is that Labor is happy for people who are struggling with heroin addiction to die on the streets of Melbourne. And it will be the local community and the families who will be left to deal with the consequences,” Sandell said.

“Back in 2017, Daniel Andrews himself said that you can’t rehabilitate people who are dead. That’s what we are talking about. We’re talking about people’s lives.”

The new Greens leader said the government would likely need her party’s support in the upper house to pass its short-stay accommodation reforms, and she wouldn’t accept housing reforms that tinkered around the edges.

“This is a housing crisis. We are in a dire situation,” she said.