Address to the National Press Club: The shape of things to come.
Senator Bob Brown
Australian Greens Senator for Tasmania
World Environment Day, 5 June 2012
Ladies and Gentlemen of Australia:
In these auspicious days – there will be none like them again for over one hundred years – as Venus comes before the full glare of the Sun, so I am before you. A little green dot in front of the furnace of the Press Club.
This is my eighth appearance at the National Press Club. I thank this vital national institution, and its sponsors, for all those opportunities to speak about the Greens’ way forward for Australia.
Famously, Kermit said ‘it’s not easy being green!’ And he was right. However in my philosophy, it’s much harder being ungreen. Green means fair to other people, democratic, resolving disputes peacefully and taking action to protect the planet’s biosphere. The real test for our herd of mammals – we 7 billion human beings on this finite globe – is whether we check our behaviour so that we don’t degrade the biosphere upon which all life including our own, depends.
Conventional politics, the governance of the rush to be rich, will fail, simply because Earth’s resources are finite. Exponential growth in a finite system fails. We must seek innovation that relies on a steady relationship with Earth’s resources, not the growth in their consumption. The Greens’ commonsense, intelligent outlook is for true sustainability. Not the oxymoron of sustainable development, but the commonsense of sustaining the biosphere that sustains us.
I love to be reminded that we are large-gonad mammals of the primate family. The magnificent Canadian green, David Suzuki, and I were motoring across Tasmania a few years back. He had written ahead to ask if I would be upset if he went fishing. I emailed back that the trout in Tasmania’s rivers are ferals from the northern hemisphere and the more he would get out the happier I would be. Anyway, he told me about the time he drove up to a supermarket in Vancouver which had a sign in the window: ‘NO ANIMALS ALLOWED INSIDE’. So he got back into his car and drove to a shop which he could enter.
Our herd of us mammals is currently consuming 120 percent of the planet’s living non-renewable resources. In his globally celebrated book on the coming ‘great disruption’, Paul Gilding, now living near me in southern Tasmania, points out that current projections have 30 percent more people on the planet this century. Those same projections, in a world where everyone wants more and almost no one wants less, also show consumption of Earth’s resources increasing 300 percent this century. We know that simply can’t happen because, those resources aren’t there.
Rather than leave it to the great disruption, we Greens say let’s use our god-given brains to change course so we can all live with each other and within Earth’s means, happily and way into the future.
One significant difference between myopic conventional economics and the Greens is we ask of every decision to be made: ‘will this benefit or harm our grandkids’. If you can’t say ‘benefit’ rather than ‘harm’, then is shouldn’t be done, whether that’s warming the weather, acidifying the oceans and so killing coral reefs and krill, or otherwise extincting other species, or entrenching divisions in human society.
Not for the first time at this rostrum let me put this simple supposition: given a referendum of the world’s 5 billion people of voting age, a big majority would vote to cut the trillion dollars spent on armies by 10 percent: enough to give every girl and boy on Earth a school to learn in, food to eat and clean water to drink. That’s what the people would vote for. But in a world where multinational corporations have more power than the people, that’s not what we get. There’s no debate, no analysis, just manufactured political foment.
For example, I see The Australian has given space to the manufactured idea that because the Greens, like most other Australians, support same-sex marriages, we must therefore entertain polyamorous or multi-member marriages. It does not matter to The Australian that such nonsense isn’t and hasn’t ever been our policy. Liberal Senator Michaela Cash says we have to clarify that we don’t support polyamory. Ms Cash has not said why the Coalition policy on marriage also does not mention polyamorous marriage. On her own logic, it should therefore be interpreted as not excluding it. Perhaps Michaela’s media release headlined ‘Greens polygamy agenda’ was just her way of becoming a parliamentary expert on a topic no-one else had claim to.
Whatever, Ean Higgins, covering this story for Murdoch, states as fact in his news column that Senator Hanson-Young’s clear statement that ‘we don’t support polyamorous marriage’ had, and I quote him, ‘outraged many Green voters’. This, of course, is untrue. Certainly, no-one has ever raised it with me. But there it is as news, and no doubt, Cardinal Pell will be happy with Ean.
Well, unlike His Eminence I have resigned to have one of Australia’s most talented women take over as leader. Since the campaigns to save Tasmania’s wild rivers, forests and farmlands in the 1980s, Christine and I have worked together as the Greens have grown. For years, Christine has promoted authenticity and integrity in products from the land. Well, she is herself a product of the Wesley Vale farmlands who gives national politics a figure of enduring authenticity and integrity.
As the new Greens Leader, Christine Milne hit the ground running and she has a premium team – Adam Bandt, Member for Melbourne and Senators Rachel Siewert, Sarah Hanson-Young, Scott Ludlum, Lee Rhiannon, Penny Wright, Larissa Waters and Richard Di Natale. They will soon be joined by Tasmanian Senator-in-waiting Peter Whish-Wilson.
Peter is here today. He is a graduate of the Australian Defence Force Academy. He has been an economist with a number of finance houses, and was, is, and always will be a surfer.
Peter and his wife Natalie have two fine children. They also have a gold medal award winning vineyard too close for comfort to the proposed polluting Gunns pulp mill in the Tamar Valley. So Peter took a prominent role in the business community opposition to the pulp mill. He is a generous-spirited and intelligent man who will be an excellent representative in the Senate for Tasmanians and Australians generally, as well as, of course, for us Greens.
Aside: My staff, Michelle and Ben
I want to thank the huge number of Australians who were surprised by my resignation as Leader of the Parliamentary Greens and have sent me, and my partner Paul, such lovely letters in the weeks since that announcement.
I will hand in my resignation from the Senate to Senate President, John Hogg, on Friday of next week, 15th June. He will inform Tasmania’s Governor Peter Underwood. Next, if all goes well, the presiding officers of Tasmania’s two houses of parliament will be informed, hold a joint-house sitting, hear Tasmanian Greens Leader Nick McKim nominate Peter Whish-Wilson to fill the vacancy and, if the parliament so pleases, endorse him. Should the message then go smoothly via the Governor General back to the Senate, I expect Peter will be inducted as Australia’s newest Senator on Thursday 21st June.
Ladies and gentlemen, Paul and I had Tibet’s Gyoto Buddhist monks at home for a quick meal last week and the elderly – I think he was about my age – Gen Lama asked me what of Tibet? I told him I have been down to see the very impressive Chinese Ambassador Chen Yuming in Canberra a few days earlier to ask again that I be hosted to China, including Tibet, to get Beijing’s concept of progress there. I hope China will let me visit.
Whether or not, I plan to attend the Rwandan Greens’ next conference in November. Their last conference saw participants beaten up with batons and, shortly afterwards, the Greens’ deputy leader was found beheaded. This conference will be in Kigali, hosted by Rwandan and African Greens leader, my friend Frank Habineza.
I am receiving many requests for books but it is not my intention to write a comprehensive autobiography. I prefer looking forward to looking back. I can’t forget the disappointment of reading Sir Robert Menzies’ post-retirement reminiscence called ‘Afternoon Light’. It was both afternoon and light.
But I am today announcing the setting up of the Bob Brown Foundation to foster environmental and green causes. Environmental heroes like Miranda Gibson, who, as we sit here, is perched 60 metres high on her platform in winter in a central Tasmanian giant eucalypt which Forestry Tasmania wants to destroy, deserve more recognition. Forestry Tasmania dynamites such giant trees as Miranda’s. I’m sure if Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite, were still alive, he would be choosing Miranda Gibson, not Forestry Tasmania, as a Nobel laureate.
My fund may also help impecunious farmer groups who suddenly find themselves facing open-cut coalmines swallowing their lands, or organisations which have shown they can simply raise the prospects for human happiness through their environmental work.
In pursuit of these ideals, the Foundation will offer an annual prize for Environmentalist of the Year, to encourage the love and protection of Earth’s biosphere. We would like to announce the first winner on 1 July, the 29 anniversary of the Australian High Court’s decision which effectively saved the Franklin River after Bob Hawke’s government was elected in 1983. Anyone wanting to know more about the Foundation, or donate to it, will find us at www.bobbrown.org.au.
Since my resignation announcement, I have had a swag of invitations and have had to say ‘no’ to too many, for which I apologise. But I will be off to this year’s Byron Bay Writers’ festival and the Bellingen Energy Festival. Some of my most pleasant boyhood hours were spent in the crystal clear waters of the Bellinger River. And I am lining up for other interesting and creative community events in Tasmania, on the mainland and overseas.
For example, later today I will be talking on a small show of my photographs on Canberra’s Electric Wall, to help celebrate the 250th issue of the magazine Art Monthly which is published out of the Electric Shadows Bookshop. This anniversary event will be launched by Merryn Gates, the Art Adviser to the Parliament House Art Collection.
Then, tonight, I’m off to Broome to join Senator Rachel Siewert and the local community which does not want Woodside’s giant gas hub to be plonked on the beautiful James Price Point because of its great Aboriginal and natural heritage values. I have spoken to one or two of Woodside’s partners, also giant fossil fuel companies, and they are happy to put the plant elsewhere while ensuring the same dividend would go to the Kimberley’s indigenous community. The bloody mindedness of Premier Barnett in not backing such a win-win outcome is reminiscent of the gung-ho Tasmanian Premier Robin Gray when he sent the bulldozers in to clear the site for the Gordon-below-Franklin dam in 1982.
Which brings me back to the ongoing saga of Tasmania’s wild and scenic forests. Since Prime Minister Gillard and Labor Premier Lara Giddings offered $240 million in return for protecting 572,000 hectares of high-conservation-value forests last August, more than $100 million has been allocated across Bass Strait but not one tree – not even Miranda Gibson’s – has been protected.
In a state where health and education spending has been cut, Forestry Tasmania, which got the forests for nothing should be returning a handsome dividend to all Tasmanians. Instead, it is operating at a loss of $5 million per month. Forestry Tasmania’s board and CEO, who have presided over this debacle, should be sacked and the high conservation value forests, including the Tarkine rainforests, nominated for the World Heritage status they obviously deserve.
I was on the stunning Tarkine Coast two weeks ago with Aboriginal experts showing me metre-deep vehicle ruts through ancient Aboriginal camp sites. At nearby Smithton, two thousand off-road vehicle buffs were massing to demand that roads now criss-crossing the Tarkine sand dunes and Aboriginal sites, be kept open for what they, quite shamelessly, call their ‘traditional use’. The Tarkine faces this onslaught, more logging and, now, massive mining proposals which will erode its integrity, every bit as much as Woodside’s gas hub will erode the Kimberley and the proposed six mega coal ports threaten the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.
This right-wing attitude to Australia’s heritage, not least its Aboriginal heritage, was highlighted, after the Smithton rally, when a gentleman drove slowly past me with his left hand on the driver’s window sill, his middle finger raised in derision. I have no doubt he will be voting for Tony Abbott, whose Liberal cousins in NSW have just opened national parks to the shooters.
In our island state, in the twenty-first century, its vineyards, organic farm produce, quality beer, cheese and fruits combine with wild and scenic tourism to give us international fame, business advantage, and jobs.
Last month Senator Larissa Waters, the Barrier Reef’s greatest parliamentary defender, and Deborah Tabart, who heads the Australian Koala Foundation, joined me to flag Australia’s first Koala Protection Bill. There are fewer koalas in Australia now than were shot in the single year of 1927. I doubt either Labor or Liberal will back the Bill. Next month I will go to Victoria’s giant eucalypt forests to see the prime habitat of Victoria’s faunal emblem, Leadbeaters Possum, which on current scientific projections may be extinct within 20 years. Victoria’s loggers plan to clearfell and woodchip tall eucalypt forests essential for this sweet creature’s future security. I am going at the request of Professor David Lindenmeyer, who provides an admirably rational voice to saving the Leadbeaters Possum. Professor Lindenmeyer has also invited Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott to take the trip. So far he’s had no luck with them, but the fate of the Leadbeater possum, like the koala, is in their hands.
Nevertheless, here’s a word for our Prime Minister. Thank you Julia Gillard for your integrity in the important innovations we have discussed. Through the climate change package, establishing private members’ time in both houses, progress towards referenda to recognised Indigenous Australians in our constitution, as well as local government, and this year, work towards establishing Denticare and the Parliamentary Budget Office, much has been achieved. I wish your government well and am glad that someone so experienced in how to make minority government succeed as Christine Milne is now there for those important weekly meetings with you.
Senator Milne has made it clear she will lead the Greens to new and stronger relationships with the rural and business sectors, in a world where the tags ‘clean and green’ give real market advantage.
On July 1st, Australia gains a carbon price, thanks to the Gillard Labor government including Minister Combet, and the Greens, including Christine Milne and Adam Bandt. This is a globally significant achievement in an age of dangerous warming, with its huge social, economic and environmental penalties. So much better than Tony Abbott’s plan to take the money off taxpayers and give it to the big polluters! Global warming was one of the issues I concentrated on in my first speech to this Press Club in 1996, and one I will take on in many speeches yet to come: it is all about giving security to our grandchildren.
We’re all in this together. Once we lose what we have, there is no getting it back. Do I think the plight of Peter Slipper warrants more press than the plight of Leadbeaters Possum: no I don’t. Do I think a potential by-election on the NSW Central Coast should rivet more attention than the prospect of 6 megacoal ports being built inside the Great Barrier Reef: no I don’t. Do I think Gina Rinehart’s squabble with her children is sadder than the current drought’s effect on thousands of children in Niger: no I don’t. And, whatever our troubles, we’re not in Syria.
We are in the most resource rich country on Earth, in one of the oldest continuous democracies anywhere in the world.
In so many ways, we Australians are the best placed people in the world to make the whole planet fairer, safer and happier. That’s why the Greens are so important. We work for fairer, safer and happier communities: and that ‘safer’ demands the end to the accelerating erosion of Earth’s biosphere.
Yet the Murdoch writers went into conniptions recently after I gave the Third Greens Oration on the occasion of the 40th Anniversary of the world’s first Greens party meeting in the Hobart Town Hall in 1972.
My topic was global democracy. The premise was simple: either we 7 billion people who on Earth do dwell work things out together or, divided, as the Bible says, we will fall. Perhaps I enraged the Kippax St HQ by pointing out that the 5 billion voters without a ballot box have less say on global issues like nuclear weapons and the dangerous gap between rich and poor, than corporations like Mr Murdoch’s News Corp.
If so, that wasn’t their obvious target. The jugular they went for was the preamble to my speech where I mused on whether there may be intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. If there is, why, so to speak, aren’t the intergalactic phones ringing? Why aren’t they in contact with us? Not very new thinking in scientific, religious or literature history!
However, among the screeches from the Murdoch commentariat were claims that I was “barking mad”, “loopy”, guilty of “inter-terrestrial ravings”, and “sounding like a latter day John Lennon”, for goodness sakes!
For people with their feet on the ground, it will come as no surprise that just last week Australia won a central role in advancing the S.K.A., the Square Kilometre Array, which will “enable scientists to study cosmic phenomena such as dark energy, magnetic fields and extraterrestrial signals…and…hopefully shed light on fundamental questions about the Universe including how it began, why it is expanding and whether (wait for it) it contains life beyond this planet.”
How do I know this? Because I read it in a free copy of The Weekend Australian.
So here, my fellow members of the Press Club, is a rot at the core of Australian democracy and global affairs. The loss of unbiased reporting and balanced commentary. One question which has engaged thinkers in all recorded history is: is there life elsewhere in the Cosmos?
But for me, as a political leader, to engage this fundamental question, was ‘barking mad’. Not that it would harm say Tony Abbott to talk about extraterrestrial potential, let alone global democracy. The problem is simply this: I am a Green, one of what Rupert Murdoch has called ‘the bloody Greens’. So I am a special target for of his flagship, The Australian, which called for the Greens’ destruction after we won 1.7 million Australian’s votes at the last election.
After I gave that Green Oration in Hobart, I had local mezzosoprano Claire Dawson, sing my version of an Earth Anthem, called Earth Song. I sang the final verse and chorus with her. Here it is:
Now here’s a promise, Our obligation, to all the people yet to breathe this air: your world is our world, our world is your world, safe in our keeping sure in our care.
The first line of the chorus is
‘Beautiful planet’
and the last is
‘Earth is our all.’
By the way, The Mercury printed these words with a very fine photo.
Nevertheless, some of the audience, I know, had their toes curled. However, that was not because I was off-key. Rather they thought a politician singing praise to the Earth, and our human responsibility for it is running a huge risk of being sent up. When, finally the mainland print media did get word of the evening, they targeted my reference to the potential of extraterrestrial life as my greatest folly. I suppose “he’s barking mad” wouldn’t have seemed so bad if they had to add “but he sings in tune!” But they didn’t. Why not?
After all, isn’t it everyone’s aim at News Corporation to sing in tune?
Ladies and gentlemen,
Before saying a little more about my own plans, I want to talk about the Australian Greens and our path ahead.
First, a blighted forecast. Those who said my departure as leader would cause a drop of 4 or 5 percent in the polls are eating their words. In fact, the polls have firmed. The public likes renewal. Yesterday’s Neilson Poll: 14% for the Greens.
The voters like Christine Milne and her new-look team, with Adam Bandt as deputy.
As far south as you can drive a car in Tasmania is Recherche Bay. On the bay’s sandy shores, in 1793, French Admiral Bruni D’Entrecasteaux and his 236 men (well, one was a woman in disguise – but that’s another story) met the Lyelloquonny Aboriginal people. For a week or so they met every day: there were feasts, music and an athletics contest. These two peoples had no linguistic, cultural or geographic familiarity. They were from opposite sides of the planet but, with forbearance and a predetermination to meet in peace, they had a communion which ended, as the French sailed away, with genuine sadness on both sides.
We mark battlefields and slaughter with enormous infrastructure, ceremony and emotion. So why not this peacefield on our own southern doorstep?
To get that elevating event of 1793 into more of Australia’s history books and, it would help for there to be a picture portraying it. So Paul and I commissioned the wonderful Sydney maritime artist Ian Hansen to paint the Lyellyoquonny people’s well documented farewell to D’Entrecasteaux in 1793. We will present the painting to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery later this year. It speaks for itself. But it is also a token of thanks to the people of Tasmania who put me into the Senate for 16 years, to the people of Australia who have increasingly supported the Greens now into both houses of parliament, and to all the people of the world who admire peace, tolerance and human forebearance.
I’m sleeping like a top. Paul and I are planning a trip to the private conservation reserves across Australia, bought and maintained by Bush Heritage Australia, which began in my Liffey Valley home, Oura Oura, 22 years ago.
And I’m busy working on 2 books. One for children and the other on secular ceremonies – for births, deaths and marriages fit for modern Australia. If anyone listening knows a beautiful, thoughtful piece appropriate for any sort of ceremony, please send it to me at PO Box 83, Cygnet Tasmania 7112.
Of course, in the moving panoply of politics, there will always be unfinished business. Let me name a few matters where public opinion and the Greens have left both the Labor and Liberal parties behind:
– euthanasia laws to better guarantee Australians have death with dignity.
– the Treasury recommended minerals wealth tax which would provide an extra $100b for all Australians over the next ten years.
– a sovereign wealth fund to store wealth from the mining boom for such future nation-building options as high-speed rail connecting our biggest cities.
– bringing Australia’s troops home from Afghanistan, as the new French government is doing, and the Canadian and Dutch governments have already done.
– abiding by international law to ensure genuine asylum seekers coming to our shores become productive Australian citizens.
– equal marriage laws and isn’t it time Australia caught up with new Zealand and most OECD countries by introducing proportional representation in the House of Representatives as allowed by the Constitution, as well as fixed three year terms of federal parliament.
So many good things to look forward to!
Ladies and Gentlemen of the media, I wish you all fulfilling years ahead. I’ll take bets from anyone who believes the growth of the Greens will be checked by my exit from our parliament. And I hope that if you come to Tasmania you will join me for a cup of coffee at the Retro.
Thank you all.
First published: 2012-06-07 03:58 AM
