Jordan van den Lamb knows how to grab attention, having mastered the art online with his campaigns against landlords, rental agencies and the state of housing in Australia.

The 28-year-old lawyer from Melbourne – embracing his handle of purplepingers – announced that he would be running in the next federal election as a Senate candidate for the Victorian Socialist Party.

Most Australians would have heard of purplepingers for two reasons: His website sh-trentals.org, where people can rate the state of their housing and their rental managers, and his campaign advocating for people to squat in empty homes.

Directly following a CFMEU rally in Melbourne on Tuesday, he told The New Daily that he “doesn’t want to be a politician”.

“If I can start conversations amongst people about how much of a mess our economic systems are, then I’ll chalk that up as a win,” he said.

“If I can just raise a bit of class consciousness amongst people, then that’s a win for me.“

Van den Lamb is well versed in managing a negative reaction – being a grand agitator of landlords across the country – and he described the reception to the announcement of his Senate campaign as “mixed”.

“It’s the same with all the stuff I do: A lot of rich people are really angry and a lot of not-rich people are pretty happy,” he said.

“I’m upsetting the people I want to upset and I’m making the people I want to help happy, which I like.”

‘Celebrity’ candidate

Coverage in print, broadcast and digital media, including The New Daily, and over 250,000 followers across social media have led to van den Lamb being labelled the Victorian Socialists’ first ‘celebrity candidate’, despite his low chances of being elected.

He said although he came from a privileged upbringing, the state of housing in Australia “radicalised” him and made him “incredibly angry”.

“I’m not really going to change anything,” he said.

“I’m going to keep doing what I’ve been doing in local communities, film it every now and then.”

The New Daily asked the Victorian Socialists if it was planning to run other candidates with large social media followings.

They said they didn’t have any specific plans to run more unless “someone who has a large following and a socialist political outlook were to express interest”.

‘Red Scare’

Victorian Socialists was founded in 2018 and achieved their best-ever result in an election in the 2022 state election when Jorge Jorquera won 9.3 per cent of the vote in the seat of Footscray.

Van den Lamb said that there has been a long and successful “red scare campaign” in Australia.

“People have been indoctrinated against socialism for quite a long time,” he said.

“Socialism is putting the voices of working people, disenfranchised people, those who can’t work, those on the edges and exploited people, above the rich.”

He cited Medicare and free university offered from 1974 until 1989 as examples of good socialist policies, but said there hasn’t been any implemented for “quite a while”.

“Since then, we’ve had a lot of that eroded and taken away and not just by the Liberal Party, but particularly by the Labor Party too,” van den Lamb said.

“We’ve got enough landlords in Parliament, so let’s stop voting for them.”