The inner-city member who took the seat from Labor at the last state election is hardly betting the house on her rent freeze bill winning majority approval, indicating that forcing the Palaszczuk Government to debate different approaches to solving the state’s housing affordability crisis will still be a breakthrough of sorts.

“Given the gravity of the housing crisis, it would be a very poor reflection on the government to not debate the bill,” MacMahon told The Guardian this week ahead of introducing her private member’s bill to the Queensland Parliament yesterday.

Developments in the last 48 hours suggest MacMahon may already have secured her short-term objectives, with longer-term goals still in play.

As is standard, the bill will move to a parliamentary committee for review after its introduction on Wednesday.

In this case, responsibility for the review falls to the Community Support and Services Committee – which includes fellow Greens MP, Michael Berkman, the Member for Maiwar, among its ranks.

As the committee under chair Corinne McMillan, the Labor Member for Mansfield, deliberates over coming weeks, plenty more assessments of the bill’s merits have already been passed.

Labor in Queensland and federally via Prime Minister Anthony Albanese have given the freeze idea the cold shoulder.

The Real Estate Institute of Queensland came out blazing describing the bill as “based on ideology with limited appreciation of economic, commercial and practical reality”.

The REIQ’s hot-take allowed MacMahon via Twitter to remind her followers that “the REIQ basically wrote Labor’s pathetic renters bill last year, which did nothing to deal with skyrocketing rents. The renting crisis sits at the feet of the gov & the real estate lobby”.

Housing insecurity, not just climate change concerns, played a pivotal role in the Greens stunning federal election gains this year in the inner-city seats of Brisbane, Ryan and Griffith, ousting Labor’s minister-in-waiting Terri Butler in the latter.

The candidate who took that seat, Max Chandler-Mather, ran a strong grassroots campaign on the issue, spending months talking to voters who share-house, live week-to-week and have little to no prospect of owning their own homes as they live among the super-charged ‘reno’ Queenslanders on the leafy reaches of the Brisbane River around Bulimba and Hawthorne.

Having observed the Queensland Parliament’s response to MacMahon’s bill, Chandler-Mather also offered via Twitter:

“It remains one of the worst things about Parliament House, watching a bunch of super rich politicians wonder (sic) around and pretend they’re being very “serious” and “reasonable” while refusing to even contemplate lifting people out of poverty when we have the money to.”

With Labor’s sub-par delivery of new public housing construction and the scathing auditor-general’s report of the department under Minister Leeane Enoch overseeing the state’s social housing program, there is more fertile ground for the Greens to cultivate, a lot of it on social media where the party’s predominantly younger and digitally-savvy representatives excel in directly engaging with their base and any new supporters to come.

Putting any altruistic motives with the rent freeze idea aside, the Greens are acutely aware they have the potential to shift more votes into their column the more the housing crisis deteriorates.

And having already tasted success federally, there’s no reason to doubt they’ll continue to dine out on the perceptions Labor is tighter with the real estate and property development titans and their lobbyists, rather than the battlers and working poor on struggle street.