Christine Zigouras, the Independent candidate for Malvern. Her campaign colour is purple, a blend of Labor red and Liberal blue. Green was ruled out. Photo: Facebook

The independent candidate on land tax, renters, and why she thinks the “Teal” label misses the point

With the Victorian election set for November, Neos Kosmos will be profiling Greek-Australian candidates running for state parliament, from the major parties through to the minors and independents. We begin with independent candidate Christina Zigouras, who is contesting the seat of Malvern.

Christina Zigouras has run for Labor, run for the Greens, and now she’s running for herself. The business owner, former educator and self-described “building designer” is contesting the state seat of Malvern as an independent, styling herself in the mould of the “Teal” movement that has upended a string of once-safe Liberal seats.

Three generations of Hellenism

A third-generation Greek-Australian whose grandparents arrived in the 1930s, with extended family still around Mildura and Red Cliffs, Zigouras lives in Malvern and argues the electorate — running from Williams and Orrong Roads through to Warrigal Road, is younger and less monolithically wealthy than its reputation suggests, spanning both the established Toorak end and a more transient population further west.

“Another surprising fact about Melbourne is the high percentage of renters. So, you’ve got homeowners, obviously, but there’s also people who are renting. So, I want to start investigating how the build-to-rent market would affect housing supply,” Zigouras tells Neos Kosmos.

She wants to claim the seat being vacated by retiring Liberal Michael O’Brien, going head-to-head with his chosen successor, Amelia Hamer, who lost federally to Teal MP Monique Ryan in 2025 and is now defending the Liberals’ 8.1 per cent margin at state level.

A long road to independent

It’s not Zigouras’s first run, and Malvern isn’t the first time the numbers have been against her. In 2014, she stood for Labour in Sandringham against Liberal MP Murray Thompson — son of a former Victorian premier — and pushed a swing towards Labour of more than eight points without winning the seat.

“You need blue blood to run,” she joked, of the family dynasty she was up against. Four years later she appeared on a Greens’ senate ticket under then-leader Sam Ratnam, a campaign that closed on a 0.13 per cent primary vote.

She rejects the idea that jumping from Labor to the Greens to independent amounts to a skittish political character. Zigouras sees her home as the ” pragmatic centre”. Zigouras identifies as ideologically left-of-centre and pragmatically “evidence-driven policy”, and is wary of party discipline for its own sake.

Zigouras wants to correct the record that she’s taken money from Climate 200, the fund bankrolling Teal independents nationally. Her campaign looked into applying for support, but nothing came of it.

“Maybe they think we’re an unwinnable seat,” she laughed. She was blunter still on why the question gets asked of her, but not of other teal-aligned independents.

“It’s an interesting spin, isn’t it? Climate 200 having Climate 200 funding is somehow bad.”

Christina Zigouras has peddled for Labor, and for the Greens, and now she’s peddling for herself as an independent for Malvern in Victoria’s upcoming elections. Photo: Facebook

Purple, not Teal

Her campaign colour, purple, a blend of Labor red and Liberal blue. Green was ruled out early.

“I could have thrown in green, but it would have ended up a mucky brown, and no one likes brown,” she said.

The Teals are not a party, Zigouras said; the name is shorthand born out of the community independents movement in seats like Kooyong and Indi.

“The Teals are not a party. It’s not a brand, but for explaining it to the electorate, it is a way that the media can put us all in one group.”

The evidence-based pitch

There are real benefits to not being constrained by party rules, Zigouras said, and pointed to federal crossbenchers David Pocock and Monique Ryan as the model for what independents add, such as “scrutiny of legislation on its merits rather than a party line.”

“Independents have shown themselves to be a really good lens on policy detail that raises conversations in the media and amongst the public that are interested in the effects of legislation and the pros and cons of what’s been going through, and also the funding that comes in behind that.”

She believes the drift of voters toward One Nation is a symptom of the same disillusionment that’s pushing others toward independents, even as the two movements diverge on method.

“The drift to One Nation is signifying just a complete frustration with the party system,” she said. The difference is what independents are chasing: “The main commonality between all of us is that we want evidence-based policy.”

Tax, tolls and rubbish bins

Land tax is her state target. She backs the residential land tax to augment housing supply, but says the commercial land tax has gutted shopping strips and manufacturing land, with no way for landlords to recoup it through rent. “It is not very well thought through as a policy,” she says.

Zigouras wants the commercial land tax reduced or wound back, while conceding the state would need to find replacement revenue elsewhere, citing federal inaction on negative gearing and the states’ ongoing GST fight.

“By listing commercial land tax on shopping strips and manufacturing land, we’re trying, on the one hand, to increase our manufacturing capacity, but they’re not exempt from land tax, and their landholdings are a lot bigger. So that was not a very well thought-through policy.”

Zigouras is just as pointed about the state Liberal opposition’s cost-of-living pitch under Jess Wilson, singling out toll relief and extra rubbish collection as policies aimed at outer-suburban One Nation-curious voters rather than inner-city electorates like her own — and, on the rubbish bins, in tension with the party’s own climate messaging.

On crime, she draws on a local “coffee with cops” session in Stonnington where police floated consolidating suburban stations into larger “super stations” to get more officers on the beat — proof, she says, that the best ideas come from police rather than press releases.

As a mother of adult children, Zigouras says the anxiety she sees among younger Australians over housing, employment, and artificial intelligence hollowing out entry-level jobs is a concern that shouldn’t be waved away.

“The impact of AI on our society, where those entry-level jobs are disappearing, is causing anxiety among the younger generation, and should not be dismissed. It’s a serious concern, because these are the same kids that are paying big money for their degrees, and then they come out of uni, [sic.] they’ve not only got the HECS debt, but then the middle-entry jobs that are not there.”

“We’re building a society that is not in favour of our younger people, and these are the younger people that are the next generations of the people that live in the west of the electorate.”

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Not red, not green, not blue, not teal: Christina Zigouras’s purple run for Malvern