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Bob Brown, Senator for
Tasmania
First Speech - 10/09/1996 It is
an enormous privilege and honour for me to be standing here in this Senate as
the first Australian Greens senator to join my colleague, Dee Margetts from the
Western Australian Greens, and to follow in the footsteps of Christabel Chamarette
and Jo Vallentine, who have pioneered the entry of Green politics into this, the
national parliament. It is an extraordinary period in human history which doubles
the privilege of being able to represent the people of Australia and, indeed,
to be a voice helping guide this parliament towards a more effective Australia
in a world which is facing great social and environmental problems. I need
do no more than quote the great contemporary British thinker and philosopher,
Jonathon Porritt, who, using `green' in the widest sense of the word, said: The
future will either be green or not at all. This truth lies at the heart of humankind's
most pressing challenge: to learn to live in harmony with the Earth on a genuinely
sustainable basis. That causes me to ask: wh
at is that relationship with
the Earth or, indeed, with the universe? Here we are, some six billion people,
on this finite, fragile living planet. We do not understand as a generally accepted
wisdom why. We do not know where we have come from and, indeed, we cannot clearly
chart the future ahead, but this much we do know: we are an amazing organism which
is able to think and reflect on the universe and its awesome and infinite wonder.
We are, indeed, the universe; a means by which the universe is able to reflect
upon itself and to alter itself. We do not know whether this has ever happened
before or will ever happen again but, if we stand back and look objectively at
what we are, it is a precious and awesome thing which deserves to be cradled very
carefully. And yet, by that experimentation and that ability to change this
planet, we have moved now into an awesomely challenging time when it is in our
hands either to proceed towards the millennium which our forebears have only dreamed
about, or to procee
d down the road of materialism which currently has this
world by the throat, pressing on the accelerator as we go towards what any person
who is thinking clearly can see is an inevitable unsustainability with the planet,
with our fellow species and with ourselves. Some millions of years ago Lucy,
the small-brained Australopithecus, was one of about 125,000 of the congregation
of what are generally accepted as our earliest humanoid ancestors on this planet.
By some 2,000 years ago the population had grown to 125 million. By the 1880s
that population--including Rome becoming the first city aggregate of one billion
people on this planet--had moved through to number one billion people. Within
the space of little more than a century that number has grown to six billion and,
if we take the most hopeful indications, the projections are that it will proceed
to somewhere between eight and 14 billion people crushed together on a planet
which is undergoing--as far as this human community is concerned--immense and
ac
celerating change. If looked at objectively again, it is a frightening
prospect because we have to agree--before we come to grips with the moves that
are necessary for us to collectively rein in our excesses and get ourselves back
to sustainability--that we are not in control. We only have to look at that population
pressure and what it means to this planet to know that. We only have to look at
the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots within the human community
to recognise that we are failing to achieve the moves to sustainability which
we owe the future generations. It is a matter of concern to me that on this
planet there are now some hundreds of billionaires at the same time as there are
1.3 billion people living at a level of less than $1 income per day. These people
are marginalised and living in marginalised areas on the planet with increasing
frustration as they recognise through modern communications that those billionaires
exist and that we in the rich, wealthy and lucky northern
countries of the
world have, compared with them, gross consumption and profligacy in the way in
which we use this planet's finite resources. We only have to recognise that
there are already on this planet some 25 million environmental refugees compared
with 22 million refugees through other causes to know that it is the environment
that is, if you like, in control, rather than we human beings. Anybody who reads
natural history will know that, if you flout the environment's carrying capacity,
you ultimately are headed yourself towards extinction as a species. That number
of 25 million environmental refugees, by the way, is predicted to double by the
year 2010, and if you look at the 1.3 billion people living in marginalised circumstances
on this planet, their fortunes seem very bleak indeed. If, for example, the temperature
rises, as predicted, by half a degree centigrade by the year 2025 when India will
have 1.3 billion people, we can expect that the wheat crop, for one, will have
been reduced by 10 p
er cent on current levels. There is no hope of accommodating
the 300 million extra marginalised people that will be on the Indian subcontinent
at that time. We have to face this reality: either we, as a nation, are going
to be outgoing and giving to the rest of the planet; either we are going to find
the means for sustainable relationships for people living in much harder conditions
than ours, and export it; or we are going to be the recipients of at least part
of the enormous mass migrations which are going to occur for many reasons, but
not least the environmental catastrophes which will overtake humanity in the coming
century. One has only to look again at the reality that if we do not rein
in the greenhouse gas phenomenon one billion people on this planet will be displaced
if the oceans rise by a metre at the end of the next century. This for a planet
on which the wealthy ones who fly between here and London put, on average per
passenger, five tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Only
today
we heard in this parliament that other great British thinker Dr Norman Myers informing
us that, in terms of the value of the carbon sink in this age of enormous inherent
problems, if we do not bring our warming gases under control, each hectare of
forest being logged on this planet is of a value between $1,000 and $4,500 for
its ability to contain carbon alone--something never written into the equation,
so far as I am aware, in the debate over the value of Australia's forests, one
which has been raging in this country. To summarise what I have just been
saying, maybe we ought to have taken more notice, we ought to have heard more
in our press about the 1992 petition to the people of this planet from some 1,575
scientists, including 100 Nobel prize laureates. They warned that if we do not
change this material charge, this consumption of the planet, within 40 years life
for many species, perhaps including our own, is likely to be unsustainable, that
we are on a collision course with the planetary envi
ronment itself. Had
that warning that the planet is going to collapse under the weight of human activities
been a warning of a stock exchange collapse in this day and age of economic fundamentalism,
it would have grabbed the front pages of the media around the planet. As it was,
it missed most Australian newspapers. It made page 9 of the Hobart Mercury, as
I remember, and one of the mainland metropolitan dailies. Less space was given
to that extraordinarily telling warning from a global scientific think-tank than
to the `Peanuts' cartoon of the same day around this country. It is very sobering
indeed to think that, after some millions of years of divergence from our feathered
friends in the bird world as far as evolution is concerned, we are studying so
hard to emulate the ostrich as we move to the end of this century. With the
rapid change of human circumstances, the industrial revolution following the agricultural
revolution, then the technological and post-technological age of information which
we
are now in, we see a changing format in the political divide around the
world. First, if we look at the industrial revolution, it was the Whigs and Tories.
That debate was found wanting and was replaced for most of this century by a discussion
between those who favoured the socialist theory and those who favoured the capitalist
theory of the centralised market. We are now learning that, indeed, it is
not just we human beings alone who determine what is going to be human well-being
but in fact we must take the planet into our considerations as well. So we have
this new and emerging dichotomy which has put new faces into this parliament,
which will put many more into it in the future and which must challenge the existing
economic rationalism of major party politics right around the planet. This
can perhaps be summed up by the extraordinary warning of social chaos in Robert
Kaplan's article in the Atlantic Monthly, the United States' news magazine and
comment magazine, of February 1994. Quoting other sou
rces, he says: . .
. for too long we've been prisoners of `social-social' theory, which assumes that
there are only social causes for social and political changes, rather than natural
causes, too. This social-social mentality emerged with the Industrial Revolution,
which separates us from nature. But nature is coming back with a vengeance, tied
to population growth. It will have incredible security implications. Think
of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless beggars
live. Inside the limo are the air-conditioned post-industrial regions of North
America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim-- which of course includes Australia-- and
a few other isolated places, with their trade summitry and computer-information
highways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction. It
is a debate that is going to rage, I think, as we go into the next century. It
is a debate about taking back into consideration the idea that we are not people
apart, that we
were cradled by the wild planet, that our bodies and minds
are a creation of the wild planet, not the concrete and plastic conurbations in
which more and more of the human citizenry of this planet live in artificial circumstances
as we move to the end of this century. So, the rise of the Greens. It began
with the world's first Greens party, the United Tasmania Group, which grew out
of the battle to save Lake Pedder in Tasmania and which had its first get together,
an overflow meeting in the town hall of Hobart, in March 1972. At that period
through spontaneous combustion, if you like--because this human mentality around
the planet tends to reach a similar conclusion, given enough time, through the
sheer dint of commonsense--other Greens parties were formed in other nations and
by the early 1980s there were Greens parties in most parts of Europe. I had
the pleasure just last year of having a cup of tea with the mayor of Dublin, the
first Green mayor of Dublin, John Gormley, although he is not the first
mayor
of a European city--that honour goes to Rome. There are four elected mayors of
Brazilian cities. In Europe the Greens share the balance of power and have a number
of ministries, including, I understand, the Minister for Foreign Affairs in Finland.
There are numerous Greens in other Scandinavian parliaments. Some analysts say
that the Greens may well win the balance of power in Germany--one of the world's
biggest economic entities--in next year's elections. They do hold the balance
of power in three of the landa, the states, in Germany. There are 17 Greens parties
in Africa. Just last month I had the privilege of meeting with the Taiwanese
Greens--the newest Greens party in our neck of the woods. They are extraordinary
people whose first act last year was to sail a boat out into the impact zone of
the provocative and belligerent Chinese rocket test which was meant to scare the
Taiwanese into voting a certain way in their presidential elections. If ever you
see people in a place that needs the Greens
it is Taiwan where 22 million
people in a burgeoning economy are squeezed into an island less than half the
size of Tasmania, where 14 dams are on the slate, where the fourth nuclear power
station has just been voted down in the parliament, where gangsters run the rubbish
dispersal system and thousands of citizens are out in the suburbs trying to stop
landfills being dug up in their particular area under threat of arrest and imprisonment.
In Australia, besides our colleagues in Western Australia as I have just mentioned,
there are 10 Greens in Australian parliaments--one in the upper house of Western
Australia, one in the upper house of New South Wales and two Greens in the ACT
Legislative Assembly. Four Greens in the Tasmanian parliament, led by the indomitable
Christine Milne, hold the balance of power with a Liberal government in place
which, by the way, in recent months, because of that Greens presence, has kept
some very important promises, including sheltering education from budget cuts,
increasing
the number of teachers by 135 and giving a greater allocation
to the free enterprise small business incubators, the local enterprise initiatives,
in the state--an initiative of the Greens in 1989, which has created nearly 1,000
jobs and which deserves the tiny amount of public funding which sees those jobs
created in the state which has the country's worst unemployment situation.
I came into the Greens because of Lake Pedder. I also went to Tasmania to look
for the Tasmanian tiger. I was a young doctor and I had the opportunity of three
months locum in Launceston in 1972. Sad to say, last Saturday was the 60th anniversary
of the extinction of the Tasmanian tiger. The last one was brought out of the
Florentine Valley, which is now almost flattened from end to end by logging. It
was one of six brought out of the Florentine Valley in the 1930s. There has been,
since 1936, no tangible evidence--no droppings, no hairs, no photographs, no footprints--that
will confirm the existence of the Tasmanian tiger much a
s we might keep our
fingers crossed for its return. I was then fortunate enough to float down
the Franklin River and be involved with that remarkable organisation--a great
Australian organisation--the Wilderness Society, and many other conservation organisations,
including the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Tasmanian Conservation
Trust, in the battle for the Franklin. Let me say this: one of the world's most
remarkable, beautiful, inspiring places was saved there because millions of Australians
cared. Beyond that, Strahan--the centre of that battle--is the only west coast
town in Tasmania which has a consistent growth pattern in terms of jobs and economic
investment predicated on the protection of that area and its world heritage nomination.
Moreover, we failed to get a dam which would have added $1 billion to the Tasmanian
debt and would have seen our power prices even higher as a disincentive to industry
and certainly would have worsened the 10 to 11 per cent of unemployment that Tasmani
a experiences at the moment. From there we have moved on to the forest campaigns
which rage at the moment. Let me just say this: I will tomorrow have the pleasure
of supporting the legislation to be introduced by Meg Lees--and I will jointly
host--on woodchipping, something that we Australians have yet to come to grips
with. How can we hold our heads high on this planet when the forests are disappearing
at the greatest rate in history and with them occurs the extinction of some 50
of our fellow species a day, when we in this country are not even containing the
loss of our forests but expanding it--an expansion which currently includes the
licensing of the clear-felling, fire bombing and then poisoning of ancient rainforests
and tall eucalypts in Tasmania with their amazing myriad of life forms, which
have never experienced the ugly impact, this cancerous impact, on forests which
comes from the charge of blinkered materialism that is out of control and at the
very least giving no credence to the cry of fut
ure generations that they
too will want such wonder and variety as part of their lifetime. Some 20 years
ago I, as that young doctor in Launceston, made it public that I am homosexual.
Now 20 years down the line much has changed but I, naturally, have not. Nor has
the Tasmanian Legislative Council. This antediluvian chamber, which I guess is
the most powerful upper house in the Western world, has no women at all within
its chamber. This brings great shame on my home state. Most recently, the
Legislative Council in debates tried to turn back some of the important components
of national gun law legislation, with a blinkered thinking. I can sum this up
by the contribution of one of the honourable members there who, just weeks after
the Port Arthur tragedy, said, `Why do we need this legislation?' During my
time in the Tasmanian House of Assembly, where I spent 10 years, I was able to
be part of many Green innovations. One of those was the `death with dignity' legislation.
It was blocked in the Legisla
tive Council in 1991 without debate--one person
made a contribution--and was unanimously turned down, despite an 80 per cent support
from the Tasmanian people, according to a Mercury opinion poll. It is somewhat
deja vu to find myself in this parliament where this chamber may soon have legislation
to overturn the Northern Territory's pioneering legislation on euthanasia.
It is legislation which I wholeheartedly support as humane, as one giving people
the right to dignity in death as they approach an unavoidable end to what has
very often been a long and loving life. The alternative prospect is great indignity,
which they do not want. It is a matter of right, a person's option, that is at
the core of debate on that legislation. I would hope that during the life of this
Senate somebody will introduce legislation to this parliament to emulate that
Northern Territory legislation. As it has already been prepared, I will also
be introducing legislation to overturn section 329A of the Commonwealth Electoral
Act, which allows a perfectly valid vote--but lands you in gaol, as it did
Albert Langer, if you dare to advocate it. I will also, on behalf of the Australian
Greens, push for proportional representation in our house of government. Most
European parliaments have it. Under recent referenda, the ACT took it on board.
So did the New Zealand people. It simply means this: on the day after an election,
everybody wakes up to find that somebody she or he voted for is in the parliament
to represent them. Compare that with the current, stultified, single-member, Westminster
option that we have in place here in Australia: on the morning after the election,
half the electorate wakes up to find that their vote was in vain, that somebody
they not only did not support but also resent is the only person from their electorate
in the parliament to represent them. We have a long way to go with democracy.
Fundamental to the obvious improvements we can make is proportional representation.
I would favour the Hare-Clarke sys
tem being exported from Tasmania, across
the Bass Strait--a gift to the people of Australia to give them better representation.
I would also hope that we will be able to rectify section 44 of the constitution
through legislation for a referendum, as the section prevents hundreds of thousands
of Australians from a basic democratic right; that is, to stand for parliament.
I refer to public servants who, unless they resign their jobs, appear to be threatened
by section 44 and will lose their place in the parliament if they dare to stand.
I would also, on behalf of the Greens, be moving for the Indigenous people
of this country, the original occupiers and owners, to be recognised in our constitution.
Indeed, I will be moving to support the concept of a bill of rights and responsibilities
for Australia, for all Australians. Coming out of a High Court ruling of only
last week, it seems that there is an urgent need for freedom of information legislation
to be extended from the public arena to the private
arena. What an absurdity--I
say this as a doctor in the past--that people do not have ready access to their
own medical files held by their own doctors. What an absurdity that we cannot
go to a corporation or a private instrumentality, a shop, if you like--or a private
school, for that matter--and find out what files relate to ourselves as individual
citizens and what is in those files. That is something that could very easily
be rectified. Madam President, I would also be moving for a restoration of
the levels of foreign aid from Australia. Indeed, I would be moving for their
increase--to complement my opening remarks to this chamber--so that Australia
can lift its head a little higher and accept a little better its responsibility
to the rest of this very challenged world. I have only to look at the estimation
by Dr Norman Myers--that the recent cuts in the Australian aid budget will result
in 500,000 Third World couples denied family planning advice, 900,000 unwanted
births and 60,000 abortions--to
see that this country has gone in the wrong
direction. It needs to turn around and go back. It certainly needs to do better
than the equivalent of 0.3 of one per cent of gross national product being allocated
to the people elsewhere in this world who deserve nothing more or less than a
fair go. In foreign outreach, I support the peoples of Indonesia aspiring
to democracy. We have been far too wimpish and quiet, at government levels certainly,
as far as that is concerned. I support the people in Burma and Tibet. I welcome
the commitment of the Prime Minister (Mr Howard) to meeting the Dalai Lama, one
remarkable human being, when he comes to our country later this month. I will
quote from the Dalai Lama, who has said: The exploration of outer space takes
place at the same time as the Earth's own oceans, seas, and fresh water areas
grow increasingly polluted. Many of the Earth's habitats, animals, plants, insects,
and even micro-organisms that we know as rare may not be known at all by future
generations.
We have the capability, and the responsibility. We must act
before it is too late. I say this about his holiness: he has said on one occasion
that were he able to vote he might vote for an environmental candidate; were he
able to stand, we might welcome him very much to stand as an environmental candidate. 
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