Banyan | Bob Brown

A pillar among the Greens

The king-making leader of Australia's political environmentalists bows out

By R.M. | SYDNEY

HE NEVER lacked for a sense of drama. On April 13th, Bob Brown startled the powers that be by announcing that he was quitting as leader of the Australian Greens, the party he has built up into a key player in the country's political life. Christine Milne, his former deputy, has taken over the party's leadership. Like Mr Brown, she cut her political teeth in Tasmania, a flashpoint for some of Australia's most momentous environmental battles. The big question is what the abrupt change will mean for the prime minister, Julia Gillard, whose minority Labor government depends on the Greens for its survival in parliament.

Until recently Mr Brown had been talking about carrying on in politics until his 80s. Under his leadership the Greens have grown from being a fringe party, focused on saving rivers and forests, to being a third force of the political centre. In the 16 years since Mr Brown won the Greens' first seat in the Senate, the federal upper house, their share of the vote has grown steadily. At the last election in 2010, the Greens won nine Senate seats, with 13% of the vote. They now hold the balance of power in that chamber. They also won a first general election seat in the lower house (eight years earlier a Green candidate gained a seat in a by-election).

But at the still-ripe age of 67, Mr Brown seems to have recalculated. Better to quit while on top, is the new thinking. He will also resign from the Senate in June, before his parliamentary term is finished; electoral rules allow his party to nominate a successor from Tasmania to stand in his place until the next election.

Of the Greens' electoral success, he said: “I could only dream about that a decade ago.” Some of it is owed to Mr Brown's commanding political presence. He has often managed to make opponents seem like midgets about sticking to their convictions. When George W. Bush addressed the Australian parliament in 2003, Mr Brown embarrassed and infuriated the then government, a conservative coalition led by John Howard, with an interjection about the fate of two Australians who were being held without charge at Guantánamo Bay.

Mr Brown trained as a doctor in Sydney, then moved to Tasmania in the early 1970s and joined the United Tasmania Group, the Greens' forerunner. He also came out as gay, in a state where homosexuality was still illegal. He was elected to the Tasmanian parliament in 1983. He reflected last week that any abuse he had faced from his enemies in federal politics was “small beer compared with what I copped in the 1980s in Tasmania, as a gay member of parliament”.

The Greens' recent rise in the federal sphere also reflects voters' disillusionment with the two main parties. The Greens have siphoned support from Labor in some inner-city constituencies by virtue of three positions in particular: their opposition to Australia's involvement in the Afghan war; their stand against the detention of asylum-seekers who land in Australia by boat; and their support for gay marriage. Adam Bandt, the party's new deputy leader, won his seat last year in what used to be a safe constituency for Labor, in Melbourne. The Greens are now said to be targeting other inner-city seats in the elections due in late 2013.

When Kevin Rudd, Ms Gillard's predecessor as prime minister, introduced legislation to tackle climate change three years ago, the Greens decried it as being too weak. They joined with his conservative opposition in the Senate to kill the plan. In so doing, they triggered events that brought down Mr Rudd's leadership. Critics accused them of wielding their parliamentary power irresponsibly. Others saw their move as retaliation for Mr Rudd's refusal to consult them.

Ms Gillard, by contrast, has felt obliged to involve the Greens in the drafting of her government's carbon-pricing scheme—which she was then able to pass through parliament, late last year. Its key feature, a carbon tax starting at A$23 ($24) a tonne for big emitters, goes into force in July.

Christine Milne was a key figure on a parliamentary committee that thrashed out the scheme. Ms Milne, 57, grew up on a dairy farm in northern Tasmania. The mother of two sons and a former schoolteacher, she took up the environmental banner against a plan to build a pulp-mill in the pristine region. With Mr Brown in 1983, she was among protesters arrested and imprisoned in a successful campaign to stop the Franklin river, in south-west Tasmania, from being flooded for a dam.

Some business leaders worry that Ms Milne might be more doctrinaire and less compromising on economic issues than Mr Brown was. In her first press conference as the party's leader, she spoke of the “biggest assault on the environment in Australia we have seen in a very long time”. She was referring not only to climate change, but also to the “rapaciousness of the mining industry”. She would like to see coal-mining, Australia's second-biggest export industry, to be phased out and replaced by a “100% renewable energy grid”. And she opposes the Gillard government's plans to deliver a budget surplus for 2012-13. The spending cuts needed to achieve it, she says, could send the populous south-eastern region of Australia into recession.

Yet Ms Milne has also tempered her hard-line, tree-hugging image with a dash of pragmatism. In her first week as leader, she embarked on a tour of Australia's farming regions, the heartland of the Greens' most intransigent political enemies. Greens and farmers, she said, share many values and have often misunderstood one another. Her “listening tour” could open the ground for unexpected alliances.

For Ms Gillard, the alliance with the Greens has proved something of an albatross. She has had to fend off charges that her minority partners call the shots in her government. After Ms Milne's ascension as leader, Ms Gillard said she hopes the Greens will “conduct themselves responsibly and reasonably”. The agreement between Labor and the Greens to work together is likely to survive until the next election, if only because both parties still need it.

As for Bob Brown, he announced that one of his first post-resignation missions will be a trek with his partner into the Tasmanian wilderness to visit Miranda Gibson, a protester who has already spent more than 120 days perched 60 metres up a giant tree that loggers would like to cut down.

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)

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