Bob Brown – world’s most inspired politician
In 1996, BBC Wildlife named Bob Brown the world’s most inspiring politician. The unofficial leader of the Australian Green Party, Senator Brown is best-known world wide as the man who gave direct voice to the feelings of millions when he booed George Bush as he addressed the Australian Parliament on Iraq.
Bob Brown worked for many years as a medical practitioner in Tasmania and was a founding member of the Wilderness Society. From 1983 to 1993 he held a seat in Tasmania’s House of Assembly and in 1996 was elected to the Australian Senate under the STV system. He has won many international awards for his work, including the 1987 United Nations Environment Program Global 500 Award, and the 1990 Goldman Environmental Prize. Senator Brown spoke in Kitsilano about our environment, human rights, and how the single transferable vote improves democracy. The following article is from his recent talk.
Machiavelli said a couple of centuries ago, “If you want to change the world get ready to be crossed by those who are rich and powerful in the current order.” You only have to look at some movements in history, for example, abolishing slavery, getting kids out of the mines and into schools, or women’s right to vote, to see how true that is.
After all, the argument went, how could you take kids out of mines and put them into schools without bringing up a new generation of revolutionaries. They railed in the House of Lords, “How could you give women the vote without destroying the economy?” Almost always it is an economic argument that’s used to block any movement which comes along to advance and improve and enlighten the way human beings interact with each other and the planet, and so it will be with us, the Greens.
We’re an essential entity in a spectrum of people who are working in various ways. For example, the non-government organizations. There are people in business, in education, in the health arena, people everywhere, living their indigenous lives on this planet, who would change the direction that this world has taken at the hands of the rich, especially those with multi-national connections who so successfully lobby politicians to bring in laws to advance their own interests.
One other thing the Greens hold as extremely important is democracy, and that we return to Parliament the importance of being the centrepiece of power, rather than the drift that we’re seeing at the moment. The old parties repeatedly, it’s in every jurisdiction, but I see it sitting in the Senate, month after month, year after year, legislation going through which disempowers the Parliament and the people that we serve and empowers the multi-national corporations, effectively the stock exchange, before Parliament.
The Greens say in a democratic system that’s functioning the Parliament must remain predominant and in control over the economy and over the interests of the unelected stock exchange.
In 1989 we won the balance of power in the Tasmanian Parliament. It so happened that we’d spoken with both the Liberals, which is the conservative party in Tasmania, and the Labour Party. Both of them needed us to make up the numbers to become a government. It was hard political drama. We lost a lot of sleep in those few weeks.
The conservatives dropped out because we wouldn’t relent on some of the important points we were putting forward, so we went into an accord with the Labour Party. We told the Labour Party we’d guarantee its budgets and protect them from non-confidence motions to give stability to the Parliament, provided Labour carry 26 pages of certain policies that we put forward.
Amongst other things, we doubled the area of national parks in Tasmania. Those are now enormously important to the job creation and economic prosperity of the state. Freedom of information, the most comprehensive anywhere in Australia, was brought in. Indigenous land rights came on to the agenda. Although it was blocked by the Upper House, I can report to you that just a month ago some of the large first-rate islands were returned to the indigenous people after two centuries of disposition.
The richest man in Tasmania, who owns television stations, a newspaper and a big component of a major lobbying corporation was caught and sent to jail for trying to bribe one of the Labour members of Parliament with $105,000 to cross the floor. He was sentenced to jail for three years but was let out after two.
Now, it just so happened it was about the same time I was in the forest very near to where I took David Suzuki and there was a blockade by citizens against the destruction of giant eucalyptus forests. We were met by a contingent of vigilantes. Two busloads organized by the logging industry came in and beat us up. The big machines came down into the parade, and they forcefully moved blockaders out of the way while some 40 police officers stood by with their hands folded. One of them told me afterwards they’d been instructed to do this.
A couple of days later, I was walking with a journalist and with a very feisty protester who’d jumped onto the front of one of these machines and blocked them on the raid on us a couple of days earlier. A couple of blokes came past in a car and one leaned out the window and said, “Are you Bob Brown?” I ignored them, but they turned around, and drove down the hill about 50 metres. A man got out of the van, opened the back, took out a gun and fired two shots in our direction. The journalist, who’d been trained for Vietnam, dropped straight into the mud, a much better and more reasonable reaction than I.
Those two guys were apprehended by the police after the call was put out by the journalist. I was a member of Parliament, remember. The court fined them $120 each for shooting on a Sunday.
The point here is there will be one law for Green activists and parliamentarians and another law for the rest. Since that incident laws have been pushed through the Tasmanian Parliament which say that if you take part in a protest you can be fined $10,000 or sent to jail for six months. It is a bigger crime in Tasmania, if you judge by the penalty, to put yourself between a chainsaw and an ancient tree, than to put yourself between a child protection officer going to the assistance of a child in trouble and that child.
The resource developers are treating parliamentarians and law as their own, and they’re having a great deal of success. I don’t know how many of you have felt the impact of getting a note, as I did just before Christmas with 20 of my fellow Tasmanian activists, which says, “You are being sued for $6.3 million by the logging corporations because you’ve impacted on their profit line by saying villainous things about them here and in Japan.” Another way of using the courts to stifle dissent against the way in which resource extractors are impacting on the planet, so they can continue on this prodigious and unprecedented rate of destruction.
In Tasmania this year, and this is tiny compared with what I’ve learned is happening in British Columbia, ancient forests will be cut down, taken to the woodchip mills, exported to Japan to make paper and very rapidly end up as greenhouse gases going up to worsen global warming. The forests in Tasmania are being firebombed. Just before I left home huge columns of smoke came up over the wilderness areas to the west.
So intense are these fires that massive cumulous clouds, like a thunderstorm, form on top of each of them. There is no accounting for that, by the way, in the reckoning with Australia’s contribution to global warming. We are, even without taking account of these massive destructions of the biggest carbon banks in the southern hemisphere, the world’s worst per capita polluters when it comes to greenhouse gases.
After the firestorms they plant genetically enhanced, introduced eucalyptus species, on which little marsupials come out of the adjacent forests to graze. After animals get used to eating those, they lace it with 10-80, which is a deadly poison. The marsupials die an agonizing death.
Now, both the prime minister of Australia and the premier of Tasmania describe these practices as ecologically sustainable logging. That’s in the legislation so it must be true.
And something, which I think they read from Canada, certainly from North America, was put into that legislation, and that is this. If the federal government moves to protect these great forests through national parks, taxpayers will have to compensate the logging monopoly, to the value of those forests as if they were turned into a pile of woodchips. This is the corporation that never planted a tree in those ancient ecosystems, never paid a red cent for the 200 - 1,000 years in which they’ve been growing there, and simply has never been the owner of them or paid the expense of their upkeep.
Being in Parliament gives a small but strong voice to those forests. It gives a compliment to the people who are activists for those forests. I am very aware that as a parliamentarian I must not be separate from the planet, the forests and the people fighting for them.
We are shaped by trees. We are shaped by the wild planet. It is our cradle and our creator. Insofar as we do unto that great wild world in which all our ancestors lived and in which many people still live today, we do unto ourselves.
I also get asked often by young folk when I go to schools, “What’s the point, Senator Brown?” There’s no good answer to that, except: When I was young, I was depressed about nuclear weapons, forest destruction, damming of rivers and cruelty by human being to other human beings. After a while I managed to understand it wasn’t very productive or good for me. You have to tell young folk that they’re going to be depressed if they have their eyes wide open about what’s happening on this planet, but they must spend as little time there as they can and then put on the shelf the knowledge about what’s going on, roll up their sleeves and get started to stop it from happening.
I’ll just tell you one other story about being in Parliament lest you think that being Green is about environmentalism full stop. Of course it’s not. I spend most of my time talking about defending public education, defending our public health system as they try to Americanize it, trying to look after the interests of people in the workplace. The current government will have a majority in the Senate in three months time and is going to remove most of the industrial laws protecting workers in Australia. And giving voice to the indigenous people of Australia who don’t have a voice in government in our country.
So it happened just a few years ago my attention was drawn to the plight of aboriginal kids in the Northern Territory, who were being picked up by a law brought in by a conservative regime in the area which was taken straight from California, called “three strikes and you’re in.” What happened is that this impacted immediately on the indigenous population, who are extremely poor, extremely brutalized as far as the culture is concerned, and very much dispossessed of hope in the future because of the impact of European culture on their most ancient culture, a culture that is so far as is known the only continuous culture anywhere on the face of the planet.
Kids who went into a shop and stole a can of lemonade went straight to jail. A 28-year-old man who took a towel off a clothesline because he got wet and wanted to dry himself had committed two earlier burglaries and went straight to jail. They’re facing mandatory years in jail under this legislation. A 15-year-old boy was caught with two others stealing a packet of biscuits from a mining company’s shed. He was taken by plane to Darwin, went through the court system and to jail.
Now, compounding the misery of these indigenous people was the fact that a boy like that, hundreds of miles away from his home, couldn’t understand English because his language was aboriginal. So he was put through a court system without knowing what was going on. He did, however, after some months in the detention centre, ask a warder how much longer he was going to be there. The warder didn’t know. It had been decided he was going to be released a week later, but this little fellow despaired and hung himself.
At that stage, much of the rest of Australia woke up to what was happening to these kids. I had moved a bill in the senate to override the mandatory sentencing laws as they applied to children in the Northern Territory. At this stage the Labour Party and other minor parties in the Senate joined in support of that bill going through the senate.
Prime Minister Howard who had set his face against any change at all then faced a backbench revolt from at least seven of his own members. Then he went to the Northern Territory and gave $5 million to the leader of the government there who had brought these laws in to put them on the sideboard, and instead release these kids and send them back to the bush to educational opportunities there and to employ interpreters in the court, at least for the adults who were going to court under the same laws.
Now that was with one Green senator in the parliament being able to speak up for two percent of Australians, the half-million who have no voice. It does make a difference being in Parliament. It does make a difference having a diversity of voices in Parliament.
I’ll speak for just a brief moment about the STV electoral system, the single transferable vote, because you have the option of voting for that, even though the odds are slanted against it with the 60 percent rule. You’ll hear a lot of criticism of this form of voting. It may or may not be the best form of proportional voting system, but I don’t think anybody can coherently argue that it’s not far more democratic than the current first past the post, FPTP, electoral system in BC.
Tasmania adopted STV in 1909 and the people love it. You ask somebody in the streets if they could explain it – the Hare-Prop system as it’s called – after the barrister in Britain and the attorney-general in Tasmania who gave rise to its implementation a century ago - nearly everybody’s eyes will raise up and they’ll say, “No, we can’t, but we do know it gives us a good result and we trust it.” And so do all the political parties. They all support it. When you go in and look at the way the counting is done the extreme fairness of it comes out of its exquisite complexity.
But, it can be reviewed and looked at and I call it sure and trustworthy voting.
Now, it was so successful in the Tasmanian House of Assembly, that it was introduced to the Australian senate in 1949 following a couple of clean sweeps in which one party or the other seemed to capture all the seats in the Australian Senate under a very poor voting system. (Editor’s note: similar to our experience with the last two governments in BC) STV has been the voting alternative there every since. Again, it is enormously popular with the people of Australia and the political parties support it.
Recently even Prime Minister Howard was asked if he was going to change the voting system in the senate after July 1, when he’ll have a one seat majority, the first time a government has had a majority in the senate for 20 years. He said no.
I recommend you vote yes for referendum on electoral reform. Opportunities to improve democracy do not come often, and whatever else this is it’s an improvement on BC’s old disproportionate FPTP electoral system. So, tell your friends to vote yes for STV on May 17.
Check out the numerous websites educating about STV and read the other STV article in Common Ground this month. You can go to www.commonground.ca, click the button at top of our home page to see a short five-minute flash animation produced by www.citizenassembly.bc.ca that demonstrates the effectiveness and fairness of the referendum choice called STV or the single transferable vote electoral system. It is required watching. It seems that the back room boys in both the Liberal and NDP want to kill STV because it would require more cooperation in our electoral system and they are invested in the old first past the post school of thought where winner takes all, and they prefer it all. Even the Greens have not officially endorsed the new STV option. All three of the larger parties are saying they are staying neutral for PR reasons. So it is up to the people to take the lead and vote in the referendum for STV, a fairer and more democratic electoral system. Now is your time to make a difference, support the vote.