Dylan Bird hosts a live clash of ideas where renters, developers and policy wonks fight over the city’s broken housing crisis.
Some of the best conversations happen around a dinner table, and Melbourne’s newest live event is banking on exactly that. Table Scraps is a fresh take on public debate, staging the housing crisis as an intimate dinner party where disagreement is the main course.
Hosted by 3RRR’s Dylan Bird, the show brings together four voices who rarely see eye to eye and lets them thrash out Victoria’s housing mess over actual entrées, mains and dessert.
Table Scraps
- Four guests with wildly opposing views on housing, density and affordability
- Structured like a dinner party with courses: entrée, main, side dish, dessert and audience-driven coffee and port
- Hosted by Dylan Bird at an intimate venue with dinner served from 6pm
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With rents soaring, first-home ownership slipping further away and planning battles raging across suburbs, the timing couldn’t be sharper. Rather than another dry panel, Table Scraps creates a living room atmosphere where real tension, unexpected moments and honest clashes can unfold.
The lineup for the debut sitting is stacked for fireworks. Housing activist Jordan Van Den Lamb (Purple Pingers, Victorian Socialists) will challenge speculative investment and landlord power. Representing the real estate industry is Jacob Caine, President of the REIV. Dr Kate Raynor brings research muscle from Per Capita’s Centre for Equitable Housing, while Katie Roberts-Hull of Yes In My Backyard pushes hard for more homes, faster approvals and greater density.
This isn’t about consensus. It’s about letting competing visions of fairness, growth and responsibility collide in real time. From planning battles and social housing shortfalls to questions of who housing is actually for, the conversation is guaranteed to get spicy.
Bird’s format cleverly builds the night: an Entrée to ease in, a heavy-hitting main course, clever side dish pivots, and a loose dessert round where the audience throws in topics for the final coffee and port free-for-all. Doors open at 6pm with the kitchen firing from the same time and the show starting at 7:30pm.
In a city where housing dominates kitchen table talk, Table Scraps feels like a necessary, grown-up addition to Melbourne’s cultural calendar. Come for dinner, stay for the argument, and leave with plenty to chew on.
To get your tickets to Table Scraps, head here.
