Bob Brown: Leader of the Greens

The 10th Ideas and Society lecture, held on 11th August, 2010.

Senator Brown speaks on the 2010 federal election, his party’s attitude to the politics of climate change and asylum seekers, and the manner in which the Greens would use the balance of power in the Senate if that was achieved.

He also discusses Australian politics and the role of the Greens with political commentator, Professor Robert Manne, Convenor of the Ideas and Society’s Program and Professor of Politics at La Trobe.

Transcript

Paul Johnson:

Colleagues, members of the La Trobe community and visitors to the university.  Welcome.  My name is Paul Johnson and I’m the Vice Chancellor.  It’s my very great pleasure to welcome Senator Bob Brown to the university today to speak to us.  Now Bob probably needs almost no introduction to all of you here.  You will know that Bob is the leader of the Greens and Bob has the rare distinction I think in Australian politics of having always been clear about his principles and always articulating those principles in the clearest manner and doing that whether it’s an election period or not, perhaps an example that could be followed by other politicians.  We would all be the best for that.

Bob has a long lifetime commitment I suppose to issues of environmental protection and sustainability.  He was Director of the Wilderness Society, and back in the 1980s, organised blockades of dam works on the Franklin River in Tasmania, for which he was arrested and imprisoned.  When protesting against logging in Tasmania’s Farmhouse Creek, he was assaulted and shot at, and after that, of course, anything that happens in Parliament House is almost trivial.

He was a driving force in the formation of the Australian Greens in 1992.  In 1996 he was elected to the Senate, re-elected in 2001, and 2007.  He is here to talk to us about the Green Party, about conservation, and, no doubt, a little bit about the Australian election.  After Bob has spoken, Professor Robert Manne is going to join Bob on the stage to have a conversation with him about some of the issues that have been raised and then there will be time for questions from the audience later.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Bob Brown.

Bob Brown:

Thank you very much Vice Chancellor Paul, Professor Robert, Di, our Greens candidate for Batman, Alex Bhathal, ladies and gentlemen all.  Thank you very much for having me to La Trobe and for giving me this opportunity to talk with you on this particular day, ten days out from the great exercise of democracy on the 21st of August.

I should say that the people that shot at me and a journalist and another person, down at Farmhouse Creek, the journalist dropped straight down into the mud – he was an army reservist and knew what to do, I just stood there and looked blank – were actually arrested and subsequently brought before the courts.  I was a Greens MP in the Tasmanian Parliament at the time and they were both fined $200 for shooting on a Sunday. 

We were let off very lightly though, I might tell you, and one of the great things about being in one of the world’s four oldest continuous democracies is that we are able to vote, and that we do have democracy.  The Greens Vice President, the Vice President of the Greens Party of Ruanda, was found beheaded a fortnight ago by a river in that country and the Greens Party there of 600 trying to establish themselves in the run to that nation’s election were busted up by a group of thugs that came into an audience of 600 people, just a few weeks before that.  And it reminds me and all of us how fortunate we are to be able to exercise our free vote.  And by the way, if you go to a compulsory vote in Australia, if you go to the polling booth and you don’t want to vote for any of them, you may put your ballot paper blank into the box.  What’s compulsory is going to the polling booth.

But I’m here to tell you that there’s a much better option than putting a blank into the ballot box.  And that is to vote Green.  Yesterday I was on the Darling Downs in Queensland, just outside Toowoomba.  This is the headwaters of the Murray-Darling system, at a little place called Acland, a village.  The problem is the village is not there.  It was three years ago – it’s not now. 250 people and 50 houses.  There’s a hall, corrugated hall, remaining and a remnant baker’s shop and one house.  And in that house lives Mr Glen Beutel and I had a cup of tea with Glen yesterday morning because everybody else has been moved out but he refuses to go.  And what’s happening to this little farming community town, in one of the most productive foodlands in Australia in an age of global food insecurity, where every morning we wake up to thousands more human mouths to feed, but every morning we also wake up to less farmland available to produce food than ever before in human history and in an age where the scientists are telling us that this is going to be the hottest recorded year in human history.  Certainly July was the hottest July in Hobart since records began in 1882 and I was in Darwin, ditto.  It’s the hottest dry in recorded history.

Well, big coal is coming.  And there’s a coal pit seven kilometres across which is going to swallow the whole of Acland, including Glen Beutel, who refuses to move because his mum and dad – he’s a man in his 50s now – worked to make it the garden town, outside the garden city and it won Tidiest Town Award in 1989, and down the road is a war memorial, which his parents fought for in a War Memorial Park, and Glen refuses to go.  I had a little talk with him about what’s happened.  He came back one day after a short period away and the houses next to his were bulldozed, and the banksias.  And he brought out a picture of a koala getting through his back fence, and gave me a card, and he showed me another picture of a koala in the main street.  This is very rich koala country.

Well, Glen, Acland, the War Memorial Park, the koala habitat, are all going into a big pit, for a mining company (the shareholders I’m told are Soul Pattinson and Mitsubishi), to produce more coal to, if not be exported to replace other coal for export in a Queensland which is the biggest coal producing, exporting, province on earth by a country mile and where rich people backing the Abbott alternative government, like Clive Palmer, multi billionaire in Queensland – you saw him perhaps a couple of rows back behind John Howard, in the launch of the Liberals’ campaign last weekend – want public money to subsidise more railways and ports to get more coal exported out of this country to be burnt in Japan, China, India and wherever else, to put more… they don’t want it but this is the result… to put more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, to reduce the rainfall over southern Australia, including the whole of the Murray-Darling basin and Professor Garnaut tells us – he’s the advisor to the current Labor government – if we don’t act on climate change, it will knock the productivity of this great food basin on Australia, and fibre basin, it provides the food we eat and the clothes we wear and so on.  90%, this century.  And I was saying to the press conference this morning, yes, Mr Abbott’s going to put 750 million into getting x gigolitres back into the Murray, but it’s not a very good investment if you refuse to act on climate change through the only really active component which is a price on carbon, when scientists tell us by mid-century the current flow of the Murray will be reduced another 30% if we don’t act on climate change.

And back up in Acland, where to use the one word Glen Beutel uses about the destruction of the dreams of the people of Acland and that village by the onrush of coal mining – “horror” – he told the media yesterday, we have not only open cut coal mining coming to Felton, south of Toowoomba.  The good farmers there are terrified that their stream with platypuses in it and their hill with two bora rings, aboriginal bora rings on it, the whole lot’s going in to an open cut coal mine, coming down the line for them, and they’re not only going to get a coal mine, they’re going to get a petro-chemical works on it.  And to be able to run the petro-chemical works, you might know that south-east Queensland’s been starved of water, they’re going to bring water uphill from south-east Queensland to process the burning of fossil fuel.  Now the Darling Downs’ future doesn’t stop there.  They want to take coal seam gas.  That’s methane.  It’s twenty times more potent in damaging the atmosphere and bringing the onrush of climate change, than carbon.  Carbon dioxide.  Well, the big corporations, backed by Labor and the Coalition and the Nationals, which should be renamed the Mining Party, the Coalition is, by the way, spelt C-O-A-L ition…  They want to put drill holes down, well, they’re doing it.  There’s a blockade at the moment, up there, with Drew Hutton, who founded the Greens in Queensland, there today.  They want to put drill holes down through the aquifer, upon which the farmlands depend, into the coal underneath.  It releases the pressure, up comes salty water, they’ve got to deal with the salt somehow, they don’t know how, but they might – and releases methane which is going to be piped to Gladstone, which is going to be piped to somewhere else, to burn more fossil fuel energy.

Well, they want to put, in the next twenty to thirty years, listen to this, forty thousand drill holes down, each compromising a hectare of farmland.  Ladies and gentlemen, this isn’t some prospect, this is what Gillard Labor and Abbott Coalition have ticked off on and will tick off on in their support for the coal and fossil fuel industry to proceed.  Julia Gillard says that they won’t have a carbon tax but they will look in a phone book and find 150 consultants from around Australia to help decide whether there should be one if they can get community consensus, but not before two or three years down the line, in other words, not in the next period of government.  Tony Abbott is much more explicit.  He, with Barnaby Joyce and co, say “we won’t ever apply a carbon price – not ever”.  Dr Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize economist, who was in this country and in this city in the last few weeks, said that economic responsibility requires a carbon price.  There’s only one party in the national parliament advocating that carbon price and that’s the Greens.  And if you vote for the Coalition or you vote for Labor, you are voting for inaction and a determined failure to apply a carbon price.

Now I want to come to the CPRS which was proposed by the Rudd Government last year.  They went to the Turnbull then Liberals and came up with an arrangement to double the flow of money from taxpayers, you, and therefore out of education, health, transport, housing, to the polluters.  They call it compensation in a carbon trading scheme.  Twenty billion dollars over the next ten years.  And what would that have achieved:  zero reduction in greenhouse gas emissions if it worked well.  And people say, the media keeps saying, I don’t get it from the public any more, “oh Bob, why didn’t the Greens support that?”  Somebody said this morning, Tim Flannery said that something’s better than nothing.  Well, I submit that something’s worse than nothing.  We went to Brian Walters SC here in Melbourne, who by the way will be the Greens candidate for the seat of Melbourne at the forthcoming State election, and got an opinion and it’s this – if we had locked into that system, not only would they get twenty billion over the next ten years, but any change in the targets would have left the Commonwealth open to many more billions in compensation and where does that come from?  It comes from the taxpayers. 

And talking about tax, the Treasury came up with an idea that we should put a reasonable 40% tax on super profits from the depleting mineral resource base of Australia at a time of boom.  Norway, population 5 million, has got a similar tax on oil and gas over there but because they know it’s going to run out and that little country’s got 350 billion in its sovereign fund for its future.  Pretty good economic foresight.  The Greens have proposed that in Australia and both the big parties say, no.  And you know how the mining corporation Extrada, Rio Tinto and BHP rolled right over Canberra two months ago, changed the Prime Minister and rolled Julia Gillard back to essentially halving the tax.  What could be worse than that?  Well, Tony Abbott could be.  Because what he’s saying is “We won’t raise one dollar off the big mining companies super profits.”  It’s down to, by the way, only coal and iron ore.  We Greens would at least add uranium to the super profits tax.  But Tony Abbott and his leader in the Senate, Eric Abetz, will see to it that not one dollar is raised from these multi-billion dollar corporations.  And by the way, the coal industry is 75% owned outside Australia.  It repatriates tens of billions a year but doesn’t want to put one cent of super profits into this nation’s future and the big parties are compliant, although Julia Gillard will recoup some eleven billion per annum in budgets after 2014.  Tony Abbott will get nothing.  The Greens would apply the Treasury recommended tax, which would apply twenty billion a year to nation-building.  To do what?  Well, for a start off, to get public education up to the standard that’s enjoyed by the better private schools in this country, in terms of spending, classroom sizes, teacher payments, the wherewithal for education – I met a young gentleman on this campus just a moment ago who says he’s just started a course for primary school education and I congratulated him.  We need more men, and women, lining up for that great occupation in this country.  But they need to be adequately funded and if you’re going to do that, you need to have the resources.  And Tony Abbott says “I won’t get a cent from the miners.”  His current plan, three to five billion off taxpayers to fund the big polluters to reduce doing what they’re doing.  What does this mean, if we get a Coalition Government?  Well, they’ve already said twelve thousand people out of the public service.  But there is going to be some very nasty cut-backs in spending on education, health, no prospect of the Greens’ proposal for a Denticare system to get rid of the waiting list of 500,000 of our fellow citizens to see a dentist.  Average waiting time – 27 months.  As a doctor in the past, I know if you’ve got good dental health, you avoid bad physical health.  An estimate of the cost of not having adequate dental health care services for people in this country is 2.3 billion added on to health costs because we simply don’t provide first-up primary dental health care.  And I visited a dentist in suburban Sydney last week who said he gives $100,000 a year in free dental health care because there’s so many people living below the affordability line in his particular area they can’t afford it.  And he knows… he looks after them, who won’t go out because their teeth are so bad.  Older people who don’t want to visit their relatives or their friends.  It’s not just a cost in terms of health.  It’s a cost in terms of self-esteem and sociability.  But neither of the big parties are going to fund Denticare.  Because they’re not going to properly tax the resource base of this country and I might add, you won’t find an editorial in The Australian chiding them over it.  It’ll be saying “Oh, the Greens are coming to tax coal.   That’s a bad thing.”  Well, not only will we tax coal, we’ll put that money into projects like Denticare, and what about a high speed rail between our cities?  Spain’s dedicated 56 billion Euros, Valencia and Barcelona and Madrid are linked up already, taken 20% of people out of the planes, put them into trains because they’re faster.  High speed rail would have people travelling from Melbourne to Sydney in three or so hours, China’s had a train clocked at 510 kilometres an hour now, France has just outdone that with 575 kilometres an hour, nobody killed in high speed rail since the bullet trains were instituted in 1964 – it’s safe as well.  It’s clean, it’s efficient, it’s fast, it’s cheap – if you must do so, you can use your mobile phone or your computer while you’re going, or get up and have a walk, or have a meal.  And look at the Australian countryside as you’re zipping by.  Well, both the big parties voted no to that when we put it up in the Senate in an enquiry just a couple of months ago.  Amazing.  We persisted.  And in this election campaign, suddenly Anthony Albanese announces they’re going to have a 20 million dollar enquiry into high speed rail, and within twenty-four hours, the Liberals, who had denounced the plan in the Senate as a waste of taxpayers’ money, quote unquote, suddenly were onside too.  They’ll have an enquiry too.  Which shows the power of having the Greens in the national parliament.

And how about, just a couple of things, because I want to leave time for discourse, which is very, very important.  Just a couple of other things.  I’ve got locked up at Farmhouse Creek but the destruction of our forests continues.  This afternoon there’s a critical Supreme Court ruling on the fate of Brown Mountain Forest in East Gippsland.  There are trees out there dated at six hundred years old.  Rare and endangered species in the water, in the trees, in the air, with those forests.  We don’t need to be cutting one more native forest in this country because we’ve two million hectares of plantations which is more than enough to meet all our wood needs.  And I congratulate the people who’ve taken that court case and I hope to get there for the ruling.

But why should it be left to the courts, ladies and gentlemen?  Why is it that in this country, unlike New Zealand or Thailand, we haven’t put an end to the destruction of these great eco-systems which are the bailiwick… this is the international year of biodiversity, but no… in Acland, up there where the coal pit is, Glen shows me a picture of a koala sitting in the main street, taken in the last few weeks.  Well, that’s going into a coal pit too with the woodlands.  And over here in East Gippsland, rare and endangered… the sooty owl, the Orbost crayfish, the long-footed potoroo, all headed to extinction, and they want to log and burn it. 

And you talk about five per cent or zero reduction in greenhouse gases under the big parties’ multi billion dollar payout scheme.  If they just stopped logging our native forests and woodlands, it would reduce Australia’s emission of greenhouse gases by twenty per cent overnight.  Now is that too much to ask of our national government?  We commit to working to that end as soon as possible.

Another issue.  Both the big parties, and Julia Gillard reiterated this the other night, are going to refuse to legislate to end discrimination in marriage.  Is it too much for this country to catch up with Catholic Spain?  With Canada, with South Africa, with just plain civilised thinking, to get rid of discrimination, deliberate discrimination, under the law?  Cardinal Pell, if he wants to hang on to that should stand for parliament.  But the majority of Australians want to end that discrimination, as they want death with dignity legislation, as they support the right to termination of pregnancy which is written into the laws of this nation, as we support the right of people coming in boats to this country for goodness sake, to be properly treated with compassion and legality under national laws. 

Well, we Greens stand on our record.  We have intelligent, committed candidates.  We are the one party with a vision for this nation’s future in this campaign.  And a vote for the Greens, in both houses of parliament, is the premium vote running for that election on Saturday week.  Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a very exciting time.  I’ve never been happier.  Because there’s a philosophical integrity in what we’re putting forward.  This planet does have to intelligently change the direction we as a human community of seven billion, as of next year, are living off a finite resource.  And this is the wealthiest country on earth, per capita in terms of natural resources.  And we ought to be setting the standard for the rest of the world, in compassion, in longsightedness, in environmental guardianship, in intergenerational equity, in removing discrimination, and in economic prudence, which makes the economy our servant, not our master, and which properly gives the parliament the job of intervening sensibly in response to the needs and the wishes of a modern and thoughtful community which wants Australia to lead in the twenty first century instead of being locked in, as the big parties would have it, to a coal-oriented, twentieth century conscience. 

So, ladies and gentlemen, there it is.  I’m enjoying this election campaign.  I love having candidates like Alex standing in this election.  I’m looking forward to the result after the 21st – I’ve been through a few disappointments as well as surprises, and I think the 21st of this month might turn up some very good surprises indeed, and they’ll be Green ones for the Australian people and the next period of parliament.  Thank you very much.

Robert Manne:

It’s great to see so many students here and it’s really great to have you at this university.  It’s wonderful for us, so thank you very much.

Bob Brown:

Thank you.

Robert Manne:

As the Vice Chancellor, Paul Johnson mentioned, there will be time for questions, but I have taken the opportunity, because I organised this program, to ask some questions I’ve always wanted to ask you.  So it’s self indulgent.

Bob Brown:

I think I’ll take my tie off and get ready for it.

Robert Manne:

Sorry.  And it will have occurred to everyone here, including you, that I’m not Kerry O’Brien, so it’s not my role to try and trip you up in any way, nor to ask the questions that I think conventional journalists ask.  In a way I want to use this opportunity to probe some of the deeper issues, let’s say, to do with this election and this country and this planet.  But mainly this election.  And let me say something personal first. I haven’t voted Green in the lower house ever I think, although last time I did vote Green in the Senate.  I will this time be voting Green in both houses and the reason is, and I think there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands who are going to do so and I have many reasons for that, but the overwhelming one is a really profound dismay at the failure of the two, or three, major parties to cope with climate change.  You’ve said a lot about that.  I want to ask you something else, to reflect on Australia in a way and the party system.  Why do you think as a country, but also the major parties, have failed so dismally, perhaps more dismally even than the United States.  Why cannot the major parties, and in a way, perhaps even the country, come to terms with this profound human challenge.

Bob Brown:

Well, I can’t give a comprehensive answer to that.  I know that I’m a Green because I agreed with the great German Green Petra Kelly when she said a few decades ago about the established parties – and she’d worked on Robert Kennedy’s campaign in the United States for President, and she worked with the Social Democrats in Germany and said they put on their green spots in opposition and they shed them in government.  And you can’t change them from inside.  That was my advice by the way to my friend Peter Garrett before he made the, I think, fateful decision to go with Labor.  But I think the power of… we have a very concentrated media.  The Australian newspaper for one has written 200 editorials mentioning the Greens in the last decade, and all but four of them have condemned the Greens and the other four have begun with “we can’t believe we’re saying this, and we have an exclusion clause, we agree with the Greens but with some embarrassment that the paper’s done so.” 

Now, there’s very limited discourse in the public arena, but I think more important than that is the secret hand of the lobbying groups.  Across from Parliament House is the big glass houses for the mining industry, for the National Association of Forest Industries, the big food corporations, Coles and Woollies are there, they do the farmers in every time, they even scuttle plastic bag, getting rid of plastic bags, and we saw it when Kevin Rudd was effectively and so swiftly removed because the miners came to town.  It’s a lobbying industry that needs to be brought out into the open, we would legislate to have all lobbyists, not only required to register but each time they visit all members of parliament, including backbenchers, to have that recorded and the topic that they spoke about recorded.  I saw Penny Wong said in an article in The Australian last year that she’d seen every coal mining company in Australia. 

When I went down to the desalination plant on the Bass Coast here, where people were desperately trying to stop that going ahead, and I won’t go into the arguments for that, except that the price of water in Melbourne will go up as a result, but Penny Wong refused to see them.  So if you’re a community group, even with the Labor Government, you’re on the outer but if you’re from the big corporations, you’re on the inner, and we need to do something, if we’re going to have fair discourse, where the decisions are made in parliament, to redressing that.

Robert Manne:

You said you were happy about the election and I can well understand why you are because it’s very possible that we’ll come to think of this election as a sea change in Australian politics where the Greens become more than a seven or eight per cent party and let’s say a thirteen or fifteen per cent party, which would  make, I think, a huge difference.  So, I can see it might be your moment.  We’ll find out on August 21st.  On the other hand, many of us, even taking that into account, have found this election campaign peculiarly dismal and dismal in a way that I can’t remember any previous campaign.  And I suppose I’m just asking whether you agree with this and what you think about it.  The reason seems to me twofold.  I don’t mean the soap opera.  I mean the policy area.  Twofold – one is the no issues that keep on being discussed.  You mentioned one, the boats.  Whatever one might think about that, it’s such a small issue and it seems to me that most of the refugees who have come have been great citizens, it seems not only a small issue, but a non-problem.  But an even bigger one maybe is this endless talk about our problem with debt when we have six per cent of GDP and yet that is… if you listen to the Liberal campaign, that’s dominating.

I don’t think… I was talking to Paul Johnson before… I don’t think I’ve heard one word about universities.  I don’t think I’ve heard one word about the war in Afghanistan.  We’ve hardly heard anything sensible about climate change.  We’ve heard from you about Denticare – so obviously an important matter and actually the eloquent way you put it in your talk about why it matters to the poorer citizens, to not have dental care.  Disability has hardly been discussed, and so on and so forth.  What’s gone wrong with the national conversation?  And I suppose, also, can the Greens change that and show non-issues to be non-issues and make the real issues in this very wealthy country, make them real again?

Bob Brown:

It’s a very good question and I don’t know what the future holds but I do think there is some parallel between the rise of the Greens and this nation leads in this regard, in 2010, and the rise of the Labor Party at exactly this time last century.  The Whigs and Tories had been in there talking about free trade and protectionism but the social dimension was left out in an age when there was a huge disparity between the haves and the have-nots and the workers and their rights and the people who were making money out of the industrial revolution. And Labor rose, it had lots of troubles, but it had a social conscience which was missing from the earlier discourse.  I think now the ecological integrity of a planet which is being overtaxed – and if everybody had the consumption rate we’ve got, we’d need three planets at least, not one – is screaming out.  But the old tapes are being run – Machiavelli said six hundred years ago, if you want to change the world, and I’m paraphrasing here, get ready to be dropped on from a great height by those who’ve got the power and the money.  And that’s playing itself out  now.  Look at the power of the coal miners.  But you know, I think the other thing is, with the collapse of the (a) carbon tax, and (b) the mining tax, super profits tax, both parties began by saying “We won’t spend any money in this election campaign.”  The ball and chain was self-applied to the foot.  And so the discourse has not been about a vision for the nation in future based on our real wealth including our ecological wealth, it’s been about a minimalist view of what you could offer on any given day.  So the Prime Minister this morning’s announced that unemployed people can get a $6,000 grant to go to another place to get employment, but will lose access to future unemployment if they don’t abide by certain rules.  And it’s got a certain Howardian ring about it, which is very, very troubling.  I think that power of the big end of town if you like, has pressed the political discourse and they’re not prepared to break out of it, but we are.  I mean, we’re free to, we’re not a faction, we’re not a preferenced machine, we’re not a ginger group, we are an alternative.  And if we don’t carry this through, someone else will rise.  It’s pretty obvious, there are fourteen million people displaced in Pakistan at the moment with all its foodlands, all its prime foodlands, destroyed.  We’ve offered ten million so far but it’s not in the political discourse.  Afghanistan – I see the US says, well, it can’t take helicopters out of Afghanistan to get people off the flooded roofs in Pakistan next door because of the war with the Taliban.  I wonder if anybody has said to everybody, let’s at least try and get a cessation of hostilities while we deal with the fourteen million people displaced next door.  But the thinking’s not at that level, and it needs to be.  And you know, I don’t think you’ve got to be Einstein to apply some human, compassionate, common sense ideas into the political firmament, but you’ll get some stick along the way.  And we know about that.  But that’s always been part of human history. 

Robert Manne:

Just to take up that from a slightly different angle.  Many of the things you suggest domestically cost money.  The dental scheme which I profoundly support, costs money.  I think it’s a scandal that mental health is not dealt with more generously in as rich a country as this.  I think people who are looking after those with disabilities and their lives are dominated by it, don’t have any help etc etc and there are many more things.  The unwritten rule of contemporary politics is that you can’t increase tax.  I mean, you have to get money from somewhere.  I would be in favour of much higher income and indirect tax, not only mining tax.  But do you think it’s true that if you… I don’t know what you’ve said in detail about such things, I should know but I don’t… if you advocated clearly increases for the upper parts of society, increases in direct tax, increases in GST, or whatever, would that be lethal for the Greens do you think?  You can talk about mining tax, but that in a way, the Rudd Government started that…

Bob Brown:

No it won’t be, Robert, but what happens in an election campaign is that the Greens get outspent.  And the attack ads have started in the ACT because Lynne Hatfield-Dodds, who is the former CEO of ACOSS and Uniting Charities and Citizen of the Year, is standing for the Greens and the Abetz and Abbott team can see that if she wins a seat in the ACT, there goes their chance of dominance, because they only need to pick up one more seat somewhere else and they’ll dominate the Senate and the Greens will be over there, sidelined.  So a huge amount of attack ads have started to appear.  Now we have not been able to match that.  We’ll do better this time but you know, advertising works.  And my view is that there should be public funding of political parties as in Canada, and there should be truth in advertising.  But when I moved for truth in advertising in the Senate a couple of months ago, both the big parties voted it down.  They don’t want to be restricted by having to be truthful in what you’re putting forward.  So we’re getting an undermining of the public debate by a very potent and nasty way which works.  Negative advertising works.  We’ll see a lot more of it in the next few weeks.  Maybe if we put some… Bob Hawke tried to get rid of television advertising and the High Court ruled it down because it was against free speech, but let’s get some fair parameters into it and let’s get some fairness into the ability of everybody to have a say, including community groups, unions, business, but at the moment it’s the biggest spender who gets the biggest result.  And that is inherently undemocratic.  One person, one vote, one value.  We’re a long way short of it.  And so we need to look at improving the basic laws which understrap the democratic system in Australia which includes proportional representation in the House of Representatives by the way, if we had that, there’d be ten Greens there at the moment.  But we don’t have it.  And you say you’ll vote this time for the House of Reps.  People think it’s a wasted vote but in fact it’s double value.  If you vote for the Greens candidate and she or he doesn’t get up, your vote goes over as a whole vote for the next party of your choice. 

I think we have a very big blight on the purchase of democracy, on the purchase of peoples’ votes, and we have to be able to redress that through some pretty strong democratic laws which will create a furore from those who already have the power, as Machiavelli said.

Robert Manne:

Another difficult question.  The way I look at Australian politics and society is to see there being a values divide between that group that are known as the battlers, whatever that means, and a group that is known as the elite, whatever that means.  But it seems to me when thinking about things, particularly since the mid 1990s, that the Greens have done well and are growing in the inner city area, amongst professionals, amongst students, amongst the educated, amongst reasonably well heeled people.  I don’t think you’ve penetrated, unless I’m mistaken, the group that are known as the battlers, the people in the outer suburbs or the regional towns…  and the question is, can you break through into the non-inner-city areas?

Bob Brown:

Yeah, I was talking to Jonathan Dickie who is our candidate in Mackay, in central Queensland, population 85,000, well, that electorate extends up to Townsville, coal capital of the world, 79 ships waiting off the port, they want to put more money as I said earlier into coal transport and there’s no public transport in the city.  Private buses, the first one starts at 7.30 and the next is 8.30.  The point in what you say is true, but what’s happening here is that more and more people … yes, the Greens have a tertiary educated component of our voter base, and more professionals including teachers, nurses and so on, if you look at the demographic.  But going back to your earlier question, there’s a pretty big generosity there, and we have the strongest policies for example, in industrial relations, we’d get rid of the Australian Building and Construction Commission which cuts down international law and picks on, in a pretty grotesque fashion, one group of workers in this country, Howard legislation that should have gone west in this last period, and also for example, Rachel Siewert negotiated when Labor got rid of Work Choices, to bring in a law which enabled the parents of disabled children to have flexible work hours.  We now want to extend that to all carers, because carers are estimated to be a thirty billion dollar contributor to the economy – people looking after disabled folk at home, or elderly parents or whatever – and it’s not hard to do that, but the amazing thing for me, and it gives me great optimism, is that, yes, I think we have an above average voter base in terms of income.  But they’re a compassionate voter base.  And we don’t get howls of outrage from Green members about wanting to get a $30 increase in the aged pension after thirteen years in which the Howard Government did nothing there.  We don’t get concern about levying a carbon tax which might put up power prices because across the board, all the polls show people are prepared, as long as it’s fair for everybody, to take a small burden out to save the next generation from a six to twenty per cent hit on their economy if we don’t tackle climate change.  People are pretty wise out there – there’s more intelligence in the general electorate –  in an average primary school about climate change than there is around the Cabinet table in Canberra where they’re corralled by these big power lobbyists.  So, no, we have a great deal of faith in a fair go.  The real ethic of a fair go in this country and our experience has been that where we’ve stood up for industrial experience for a people, for boat people, the much stigmatised boat people and so, our voter base grows.  And that gives me great optimism about the future.

Robert Manne:

And you think you can break into a different kind of demographic…

Bob Brown:

I think we have.  We’ve overtaken the Nationals in the bush because people out there can see climate change happening to them.  The National Party has become the Coal Party.  And we’re into food security, bio-security.  The Fin Review editorial two weeks ago, let’s get rid of bio-security because it’s in the way of the free market.  Excuse me?  You know, preventing pests and the further invasion of croplands in Australia due to reducing the bio-security at airports and seaports and so on, no, you don’t do that, that’s not good economic management.  And I just think the big parties have become too frightened of the lobbyist at the expense of backing a much more important entity, which is the intelligence and compassion abroad in the wider Australian community, and that’s where I and my fellow Greens put their faith.

Robert Manne:

I’ll just have a couple more questions and then we’ll open up to the audience.  One is, maybe you can’t answer it, given that this is not a private meeting, but nevertheless I’d be interested if you can, but, do you think the Greens are treated fairly by the media?  Or do you feel that you’re up against it because of the nature of the Australian media?

Bob Brown:

Look, I think like all changes, if you said, are we getting twelve per cent coverage in the media at the moment, no we’re not.  If you look at the national package on ABC each night, I think I’ve appeared twice since the election got underway, or three times.  But every night the other political leaders are there.  So we don’t mind.  Really, if you get to grizzling about your coverage, and I see an article in today’s Herald Sun about people who are going to vote Green this time.  There’s a change occurring Robert and it’s because we’ve put in the hard yards, we’ve put in the work and the media is changing.  And it’s very, very important that we are getting scrutiny and that we are being asked the hard questions.  That’s a sign of maturation.  No, we’ve in the past had a hard time in the media, but every time we get a bit worried about that I go back and look at what they said about the suffragettes.  And thundered in the House of Lords and in The Times and so on.  How on earth could you run the economy if women had a say in it? was the standard stupidity and boofheadedness of commentators who were running the media just a hundred years ago.  Well, a little bit of negativity in the media about the Greens – when you put it into proportion – getting rid of slavery.  How could you run an economy … and they thundered that there would be a trade loss in the British Empire is they got rid of slavery, 1809, read the transcript in the British parliament, and the trade will all go to the US, where they did have slavery.  And so, the trade exposed industries were going to be hurt.  They’re the same ones that in this time of climate change that the big parties want to compensate in Australia.  Even the Greens have that built into our carbon tax proposal.  But, no, history repeats itself and if you’re a bit discomforted about getting a hard time of it, just go and look what’s happening elsewhere in the world and what’s happened in the past.  The suffragettes didn’t live to see, most of them didn’t live to see the fantastic outcome.  We now take it for granted.  And I like to think in ecological terms of the greening of the global population, you know, have a public census about… a global referendum tomorrow about diverting six per cent of the trillion dollars being spent on armaments this year to ensure that every child on the planet had clean water, food in her or his belly, and a school to go to – and I know what the result would be. 

Robert Manne:

My last question, then I’ll open up to the floor.  An acquaintance or friend of mine, Guy Pearce, says of the Greens that they’re more liberal and he means small “l” liberal, than the Liberal Party and more labour than the Labor Party, as well as being I think greener than the others.  I suppose my question is quite a difficult one, sometimes I think what the Green Party is doing or has to do, is to inherit two traditions.  One is the tradition of small “l” liberalism, particularly in the area of civil liberty, the other is the tradition of what I call social democracy, in the area of, as it were, what Australians call a “fair go”.  Do you see it that way, that you can in a way, be the inheritor of traditions but add, as it were, the green dimension, or do you see your party as essentially an environmental party with small add-ons in the areas of small “l” liberalism and social democracy.

Bob Brown:

No, I was talking with a gentleman from The Age about this this morning when I ran into the Uniting Tasmania Group, the first Greens Party in the world.  After I went to Tasmania, they had just formed a month before I got there in 1972, after the flooding of Lake Pedder and they had this ethic, and here was equality for women.  It’s a bit hard to remember how loaded everything was against women back then.  We were the way to go, but there it was.  Recognition of indigenous Australians, protection of farmlands, stopping this nascent, then, wood chipping industry which was going to destroy… and across the board an economic ethic of a fair go for people who were in poverty.  So right from the outset, it’s dovetailed as an environmentalist and a former Presbyterian, I found this very pleasant, to see that a compassionate ethos towards people, a fair go in society, dovetailed in with an ecological common sense.  But Robert, the thing the big parties are missing is that constraint.  I came on to the planet in 1944 – there were 22.7 billion people.  Melbourne’s population had just crossed a million but was less than one and a half million.  Now there’s seven billion people, at least there will be next year, and by the time many of you folk are my age, there’ll be ten billion.  And yet, as I said, less farmland every morning.  But the aspiration of the rapidly growing economic units in Africa, in India, we all know about China, is to consume like we do, and it’s not there.  And we have to have the intelligence to be able to apportion the riches of this planet so that we simply give security back into the future and are able to give our grandchildren the ability to look back on us and say, you thought about us, and you were wise enough to change course when the course of free rein consumerism of the twentieth century was straight at a brick wall, and where we’re turning, it is a bit like turning the Queen Mary, we are turning the ship around.  I don’t know – I  sometimes worry that we will become complacent, that we will become too confined by the parameters of public debate, particularly the media debate, but I’m very, very worried about that.  I read about it, I look about it, I see the global scientists, hundreds of Nobel prize winners, saying, we must tackle climate change.  And Maggie Thatcher said in 1989, “Every year we delay on climate change, the cost of dealing with it goes up”.  Now I’ve found something I agree with Maggie Thatcher on.

But they’re not listening in Canberra.  And this is a crisis, not just for humanity, but this is the International Year of Biodiversity and the biggest extinction rate in human history will be this year.  And it’s going to be worse next year.  And here we are destroying forests.  Here we are having greenies who lock themselves onto bulldozers, having to go to court to try and argue this case because the Brumby Government or the Gillard Government, or and worse still, the Abbott-Abetz Opposition, wants to keep funding the destruction of those forests.  When you think about it, it’s the getting of wisdom.  That’s what the Greens are about, and we’re not shy about that.  Once you know about it, you can’t change.  It doesn’t matter how many Australian editorials they might throw at us.

Robert Manne:

Bob, are you willing to take some questions from the floor?  So if I could ask people who would like to ask questions to come to the microphone and perhaps, form an orderly queue as Australians like.

Owen:

Well, hello Bob, and thanks for coming to La Trobe.  My name’s Owen.  I’m a student activist here and I guess wanted you to talk a bit about refugees.  So, given the bipartisan support of mandatory detention and off-shore processing by both of the major parties, the Refugee Action Collective have actually decided to have a demonstration before our great exercise of democracy on the 21st.  I just wanted to plug that first.  It’s on Friday the 13th, at 5.30 at the State Library, so everyone who clapped in the audience when you said the great things that you did, should come along to that.  But yes, I was wondering if you could make some comments about the Greens’ position both on mandatory detention and also on offshore processing.

Bob Brown:

Yeah, well, I hope a lot of people do join you on Friday the 13th.  A recent opinion poll in Australia showed that 95% of Australians and goodness knows what the other 5% were thinking, would gather up their families if they were in a war zone, and would pay people to get them out of there to safety.  That’s what the said boat people were being.  And yet the Sydney Telegraph, Saturday fortnight ago, headlined “INVASION…  Armada of boats ready to sail for Australia”.  I mean, totally reprehensible.  Tony Abbott’s taken up some of that lingo.  The best way of being able to be strong on this issue is to talk with folk who have been in those boats.  We know the vast majority, I think it’s 97%, have turned out to be genuine asylum seekers, sure, send people who are not, home.  But we’re not dealing with the 50,000 people in this country who have overstayed visas who have come by plane and who are genuinely illegal.  Boat people aren’t.  It’s your right to seek asylum.  So, that focus, and it’s got a good stream of xenophobia in it, which has led the sections of the press and the big parties, particularly Tony Abbott, to be vilifying these folk at the expense of their rights, their feeling as human beings, and our own feeling as a compassionate and just nation, can’t be underestimated.  Sarah Hanson-Young has been speaking out very strongly about people being processed in this country.  Why should we put it on to Timor Leste, the poorest country in the region, whose parliament says they don’t want to, when we can do it in our own country?  Maybe we should be training Timor Leste’s doctors, instead of them having to send them to Cuba.  That would be a sign of being good neighbours.

Question:

Before I ask my question I just wanted to say, I’m 23 years old and this will only be the second time I’ve voted in a Federal election and I’ve always been a bit befuddled by politics in Australia, especially what comes out of the mouths of party leaders.  But I’ve never heard so much common sense come out of a politician than I did from you today.

Bob Brown:

Thank you.

 :

I would just like to ask about another important issue that hasn’t really come up in the media, as you were mentioning.  Can you tell us a bit about what your party will do for Aboriginal equality in Australia, in areas such as education and health care, employment?

Bob Brown:

Yeah, the first thing is that recognition of indigenous Australia and original sovereignty and the priority for indigenous Australia should be written into our constitution.  We should have a treaty with indigenous Australians and on terms which they agree with.  The sidelining of the Racial Discrimination Act for the intervention in the Northern Territory is a pretty disgraceful component of Australian history.  I’ll just give one simple example.  Otitis media, middle ear infection, there’s a more than ten per cent rate of that in indigenous kids in northern Australia – it’s way above what the World Health Organisation would ever permit in poorer countries, yet we don’t have testing for it.  The Greens would immediately see that every child going to school in the northern Australian regions where otitis media is rampant – lose your hearing, you can’t learn.  But there’s a lot we can do about it.  Prevention’s the first thing but then equipping schoolrooms with the new acoustic technology that’s required, where you’ve got classrooms where more than ten per cent of kids can’t adequately hear.  By the way, they have access to teaching in their own language as a priority is an indication of the policies that Rachel Siewert and the Greens are putting forward.  Thank you.

Kath:

Hi Bob.  Nice to see you here today.  My name’s Kath, I’m the National Queer Officer from the National Union of Students and I’ve worked a bit with various members of the Greens in this campaign, for same sex marriage.  You talked a lot today about your own sort of past experiences at demonstrations and stuff around environmental movements.  You also mentioned before movements to get rid of slavery, movements for women’s rights, all of which obviously took, you know… people on the streets as well as people in the parliament.  There’s a demonstration coming up for same sex marriage also, which is the week before this election, this Saturday, which is August 14th, out at the State Library.  I wanted to know what the Greens’ position is in terms of your street demonstrations as well because obviously you’re heading towards having greater and greater numbers in the parliament but I’m hoping that there’ll still be a focus on protest politics and continuing to support the sort of grass roots campaigns as well.

Bob Brown:

Well, having come from where I am, it’s fundamental to democracy.  Violence isn’t.  One of the four pillars of the Greens is peaceful solution of human affairs, and it’s non violent action that we support.  And I regularly go out into the forests and spend time with the folk who are out there unsung these days, in the forests of Tasmania, and I hope to get to that court case this afternoon and I hope it turns out right.  But when the law is wrong as Thoreau wrote in 1840, maybe the right place for a citizen to be is behind bars through peaceful protest.  After Thoreau, Tolstoy and Ghandi and then King took that up.  It is an essential component of the progress of human affairs.  And must at all times not just be tolerated, but we must as a society be thankful for people who go out of the lounge chair and state their grievance and point to answers.  And discrimination under the law in the marriage legislation is just one of those things.  It’s very frustrating.  Both the big parties are saying they won’t do it.  It will happen.  It’s coming.  And because the Greens are there… the polls show a huge majority of Australians are in favour of it, brings forward the day when it will happen.  Never let anybody who’s involved in a street protest on something like that think this is whistling in the wind.  It isn’t.  It’s how society changes.

Jess:

Hi Bob.  My name is Jess.  I’m 19 so this will actually be the first time I’ve voted.  My question is, what is your response to the blatantly homophobic statements recently made about same sex marriage from Wendy Francis, from Family First, and One Nation’s John Cunningham?

Bob Brown:

Well, Jess, they are in a free society, but it’s pretty disgusting.  And apologising later is a good thing, but I don’t think voters will count either of those things very well at all.  Times are changing and homophobia, and I know, I’ve experienced this in volumes, back further down the line, but the change in our society is terrific, and it will come.  But we’ve got a long way to go, the rest of the world, one only has to cite Iran for example, and some African countries at the moment and legislation against people who are homosexual, to know what a long way we’ve got to go.  But in our society there are remnants of that hate, it’s not just a phobia of something, it’s hate for difference in a world in which we should celebrate difference.  And it wasn’t until I learnt that one that I started to get the confidence to be sitting here on this stage today.  So thank you for raising that question.  It’s important and I’m very encouraged by the feedback I get, speaking up about issues which were once taboo but are which are bringing freedom to Australians who have every right to express their natural abilities and their natural sexuality and their gender, and whatever else they might be as part of a society which is enriched by variety.  Thank you.

Robert Manne:

I have to apologise to those in the queue including the gentleman at the microphone.  I’ve been signalled that time is brief so I think…

Bob Brown:

If he asks a quick question, I’ll answer it quickly.

Robert Manne:

Then we had better go.  But I do apologise to others in the queue.  We do have to finish.

Question:

I’ve got a quick question which doesn’t seem like a big important issue.  But I feels it’s a very effective policy change that Australia could make.  As you may be aware, Australia and New Zealand are one of the very few countries across the globe which has compulsory helmet laws.  Now recently Melbourne has introduced a bike share program which has failed dismally and I’m sure will be cut very quickly.  Respecting your position as a former doctor, I understand that helmets do reduce the severity of head injuries.  I’d just like to ask whether the Greens believe that perhaps Australia’s compulsory helmet laws should be repealed to aid our attempts to reduce obesity, which is a massive problem, mitigate climate change and increase efficiency of infrastructure spending in Australia.

Bob Brown:

I’m not sure of the trade-off between protecting your skull and preventing obesity, but you know, if there is one, then it should be looked at.  What I can say, and I’m not avoiding that answer – I don’t have enough knowledge to answer that well, but I cannot see another road being built in this nation without a bike way as part of that road work.  And we absolutely have to move ourselves into walking and cycling and to be able to move around without burning fossil fuels into the future and that’s right at the top of the Greens’ transport inclinations and policy list.

Robert Manne:

I’m sorry.  We do have to…

Question:

Cubbie Station, I’m worried about Cubbie Station.

Bob Brown:

Well, Cubbie Station is a blight.  They were given a licence and they’re going to make millions, hundreds of millions, if not by selling overseas then by a buy-back at taxpayers’ expense.  It should never have happened.

Question:

Now that was worth a question Mr Manne, wasn’t it?

Robert Manne:

It certainly was.  Unfortunately time is short but I just want on behalf of the university and the program I’m involved in to thank you so much for the generosity and the wonderful words you’ve said and I do hope we’ll give Bob a really standing ovation because he deserves it.

Bob Brown:

Thanks, everybody.

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