Bob Brown: the interviewBy DAVID OWENDavid Owen: In Tasmania 2004 marks the official bicentenary of white settlement. The island’s recorded history includes near-genocide, appalling treatment of convicts, a mentality of ‘if it grows chop it down, if it runs shoot it’ – yet it’s also been a past of pioneering hardiness and courage, cultural innovation and highly significant environmental awareness. How do you reflect upon all of these things in 2004? Bob Brown: If it runs shoot it or dam it ... Well, here we are sitting by the wharf in Hobart with the mountain as a backdrop, and like no other city the capital here has got the environment symbolised by the mountain right there for us, face to face every day. And between the wharf and the mountain goes a stream of log trucks, ripping the heart out of the grandest hardwood forests in the world, to line the pockets of people largely outside Tasmania, through the Sydney Stock Exchange. And going past the concert hall, which had to be soundproofed to the cost of an extra three or six million dollars, for which the logging companies paid nothing, so their log trucks wouldn’t add to the tympanic component of the symphony being played in that hall. It’s in-your-face, it’s the best and the worst of the world. Fortunately the best is represented by the people here, who are overwhelmingly appalled by what’s going on. And the worst, as on a global scale, is represented by the big end of town, backed by the media, backed by the unions, backed by the captains of industry to keep the log truck tumbrels rolling. DO: Tasmania’s history seems to be encapsulated in symbols. Truganini, Port Arthur, the thylacine, Lake Pedder. The list goes on, but it is fascinating that when you first came to Tasmania in 1972 you joined a thylacine research team while in fact Pedder was being flooded. How do you look back upon that particular year – if you do? BB: Well, I came here for both: I was attracted by both Lake Pedder and the thylacine, the first of which was about to be made extinct – they thought – and the second of which had already been made extinct. We know the thylacine is extinct and the New South Wales government – of all people – is putting tens of thousands of dollars into trying to rejig the DNA out of a bottle with alcohol in it of thylacine pups, to see if we can’t get one back. But the thylacine was shot to death by the politicians of the Tasmanian House of Assembly and Legislative Council in 1888, who voted for a one-pound bounty on the head of each of them, with the intention of getting rid of them. Lake Pedder was dammed to death by both the Labor and Liberal parties in 1969-72, who were acting illegally but then found they could bring retrospective legislation into the parliament to validate their decision to dam and obliterate a national park and a number of species which went to extinction with that dam – species of plants and aquatic animals. It was a bad year for those reasons, but also a great year, because I came across the caravan of the Lake Pedder Action Committee in Launceston, and I ran into people of the Conservation Trust and also some young journalists, including Peter Thompson, who’s now on AM radio and who then lived in Launceston. And so I suddenly found people who were interested in the things I was interested in. And with the United Tasmania Group, which was set up on 23 March 1972 at the Hobart Town Hall, an ethic fitted that was – uplifting. DO: Something new for Australia? BB: Well, it just fitted. Here was ... it put the lie to the destruction of resources being essential for the creation of riches and it came up with a new ethic which said, we can have the bounty of new technology and a more comfortable life without destroying the planet, upon which our own spiritual and mental wellbeing depends as well. So it was a year of extraordinary contrasts. DO: And then of course ten years later the Tasmanian government began construction work on a dam on the Gordon River. The Commonwealth stepped in and used its external affairs powers to halt that construction, in order to protect significant Aboriginal sites, particularly Kuta Kina Cave, and also the wilderness area of world significance. Yet in reality it wasn’t Bob Hawke and seven judges who stopped it, but thousands of people. That was a monumental victory, for all sorts of reasons – but I wonder, twenty years on, do you think Australians have it in them today to again become that committed to a single cause? BB: Yes. But first let me say that at lunchtime with Christine Milne and Margaret Blakers a while ago, I was musing that if that matter went to the High Court now – or indeed at any time since Justice Murphy left – it would be unlikely to get the four-three majority it got on 1 July 1983. But you can feel the rising tide of anger about the forests. It’s been a long time coming. People do not want to confront the nasty realities of what their leaders and politicians are doing, but the Doctors for Forests poll shows 85.4 per cent of Australians are against it, and only 6.1 don’t want federal intervention, and even in Tasmania it’s three-to-one in favour of the federal government using its powers to stop this destruction of the Styx and the Tarkine and the Blue Tier and the other forests. We never got a poll result like that during the Franklin years. Not ever. It was always very close, and after the dam got under way, the poll showed most Tasmanians favoured the dam proceeding – which is how things were in 1983. But here we’ve got the export woodchipping industry marauding our forests and people by more than three-to-one in Tasmania saying, for goodness’ sake, the national government should step in and put an end to this destruction. DO: You entered the Tasmanian House of Assembly in 1983 and you were the member for Denison for ten years. Subsequently as leader of the Australian Greens you’ve been a federal senator since 1996. How do you rate the standard of political debate and backroom dealing within our federal and state institutions? Do you think Australians get their vote’s worth? BB: No. Democracy is debased by money. We Greens have fought for a long time against the corporate donation system going to the big parties. No corporation can within even their own ethics give money to a political party without an expected dividend – that’s what the shareholders must expect. And yet millions of dollars each year are going to that end. Horses for courses. Norm Sanders many years ago said of the Tasmanian parliamentarians they don’t have the brains to put their hands out. But Gunns, notwithstanding that, has given fifty thousand dollars to the Labor Party in the last year according to the figures released the other day. And the Liberals are getting a sizeable donation there as well. And that just cements home the big-party subservience to this big corporation – and why shouldn’t the corporation put aside fifty thousand out of the seventy five million dollars it made this year at the expense of Tasmanian people, their roads, their forests, the cleanliness of their streams and drinking waters and the safety of their kids catching the school bus in the morning. Gunns pays for none of those things. But the anger is rising. They’ve been picking off little community groups all around the state and suddenly there’s this general feeling among people that, hey, we’re not the only ones, and people power’s coming to the fore again. DO: The Australian Greens only became truly national last year when the WA Greens joined. That’s quite a long way from 1984 when Petra Kelly said it would be a good thing to have a national green party in this country. Are there any inherent difficulties within the state groups that have made it difficult to have a national green party? BB: Yes. After the Franklin campaign in 1984-5 we set up the Liffey group, simply because a group of people got around the fire at Liffey and thought it time to see if we could establish a national greens party. We went to Sydney in Easter of ‘85, where the majority of five hundred people at a conference – and it was organised, interestingly, from Tasmania – voted down the idea of an Australian Greens. And there has been this curious abreaction within the green movement, not just here but in Germany and elsewhere, of people who think politics is a bad thing – want to get into politics but not be politicians. Well, the news is, if you’re going to get in there you have to be able to use the system for the good, the same as it’s used for the bad. And you have to be able to deal with some very nasty currents, influences and people. A lot of people say, no, we should stay out of that. And so they should. But those of us who have waded into it are essential, because if you don’t believe in democracy the question is, what else is there? And if you do believe in democracy then you have to have people in the parliaments who are going to complement the people fighting for justice outside, whether it be for a fair go for education or health, or the environment or whatever. DO: The other side of that coin is that the environment knows no geographical or national boundaries and therefore a global green party might one day reflect that. Or is that just wishful thinking? BB: No – not only a global greens party but a global parliament. Because if there’s one thing that impresses me about George W Bush it’s his repeated dream of democracy and freedom. He uses the words more than anybody else I’ve heard and I’m right in there behind him. So, with that in mind, last year I moved in the Senate that there be established a global parliament on the basis of one person one vote one value, to deal with truly international issues – without taking from national governments the right to deal with truly domestic issues. Curious thing: not one person in the Senate except for my colleague Kerry Nettle voted for it. Every other party voted it down, and one colleague who I have a lot of respect for, from another party, said, Do you really know how many Chinese there are? So, when it comes to democracy, this is a thing that is lip service. We are a world community, we cannot have security without democracy and that means giving equality to people. Multinationals don’t want it, George Bush doesn’t want it, John Howard doesn’t want it. And it’s going to be to the Greens to do it. But the second thing is, if we’re going to be effective as a new global political movement then we have to be globally connected, and the multinationals, who are the de facto world government at the moment, have huge global connections. DO: Ironic. BB: It is ironic. And there are some Greens, for example in England, who say, no, we’ve got to withdraw and be regional and make sure all the crops we need are grown in our own area and so on. That’s fine, but I’m a globalist and I believe we shouldn’t have the economy running global politics. It should be the good of the people, and the planet, that’s running it. DO: The one thing that is shared by all. Okay – the Australian continent is arid with poor soils and a fragile ecosystem. It has been seriously damaged over the past two hundred years – BB: Almost like a description of Liberal Party philosophy, isn’t it? DO: Quite. Today’s list of problems seems endless and even depressingly so: the Murray, cane toads, salination, marsupial extinctions, old-growth logging, and it goes on. Are you fearful of the future in this regard? BB: In the Town Hall at a meeting in the 1980s on forests, Colonel David Hackworth, the most decorated American marine in the Vietnam War, was in town and he grabbed me by the lapels and he said, Bob, you’ve got to stop – you’ve got to pass on beyond this forest stuff. President Reagan is about to win a second term and there’s the nuclear menace – the world’s going to come to an end if they press the button. And it suddenly dawned on me – my reaction to David was, mate, if that’s the case I’m going home to read a book. You mustn’t panic. You have to assume that there’s time and that we human beings can work it out. Getting burnt out, frazzled, madly intent, is something I learnt – and you have to learn – long ago not to fall prey to. After spending ten years or more depressed as a youngster I realised that you can be optimistic or pessimistic, take your pick – they feed on each another. What’s going to happen in the future I don’t know, but I’m on the side of allowing, shaping, a future in which human beings have a role. DO: Small environment issues can seem like a joke, which of course they’re not. For example, in Tasmania the Meander Dam project will flood a valley in the north for proposed economic benefit. But, without trying to be too simplistic, it seems to be about jobs and energy versus seven or so endangered spotted-tailed quolls known to live in that valley. Federal environment minister David Kemp wants the flooding and the creation of an artificial corridor which he says will in fact enhance the quolls’ future. Do you believe that? BB: Yes, like I believe that when the federal minister of the day said, Well, if we flood the Franklin we could cut out the caves and also lift the Huon pine up and replant them next to the banks of the new dam. I mean, weren’t we silly to pass up that option? Aren’t we silly to think that David Kemp hasn’t solved all our problems by saying he’ll flood their whole universe but make it better for quolls. That’s malignant. This is deliberate premeditated delusion to try to justify the unjustifiable. But on and on it goes. Greenwash is all through politics and commercial enterprise now. Everything is eco-something or other. We no longer have tourist ventures, they’re all eco-tourist ventures. We don’t have lodges, they’re all eco-lodges, we don’t have outdoor education, it’s eco-education. Not just greenwash; it’s all environmental degradation dressed up as sympathy. If you can’t get your way with public opinion, then try to fool it. Hence the Doctors for Forests poll last week on old-growth forests: the very next day a new term appeared. Suddenly we were dealing with mixed-age forests. They weren’t logging old growth forests. Just incredible movement of language to avoid the reality that we’re all dealing with. DO: The editorial of the current issue of Green, the magazine of the Australian Greens, reflects upon the party having become ‘a broader progressive force in Australian society’. I’m sure there are many voters out there who still simplistically see the Greens as a single-issue party, whereas your stand on refugees for example has been a particularly strong one. BB: One didn’t have to know the Greens charter to know that when the prime minister effectively asked the Tampa to pick up 436 people drifting in the ocean and then said, Don’t bring them here, this was a breach of natural justice and probably human empathy. So I immediately held a press conference. It’s interesting how people have said since, Oh well, the Greens are going for this or that vote. Well, no. First up, for two or three weeks we got horrendous phone calls, pictures of nooses, bullets in the mail. Apparently the humanist people in the community were by and large knocked into silence. Yet the Green vote was doubled at that election. I just think we have to have a global vision, be humanitarian and judicious about it. We have to make sure we do have good security and be aware that people will try to usurp any rules they can if they can get advantage from it. People have to be protected from that. But when you see a ship sinking in the ocean, loaded with people fleeing terror, you don’t then throw them a lifebuoy but cut the rope. DO: Following directly on from that, as a federal MP yourself you have observed John Howard at relatively close quarters and how his Coalition has governed since 1996. John Howard doesn’t fit the dictionary definition of a racist but he seems to have many of the attributes of a white supremacist. Perhaps one of the traditional values he’s mourning the passing of is the White Australia policy. I wonder if he’s an astute politician tapping into some latent aspect of the Australian psyche, however uncomfortable that may be, or do you think that it’s much more personal? BB: He and I both share a background of ideas that were being formulated in the fifties, and he was much better at grasping them and keeping them than I was ... And I think you’re being very kind to him in that question. But he is still the hunter-gatherer in the valley which has to be defended from anybody popping their head over the ridge. So instead of having a feast and exchanging cultures and coming to a mutual security pact, he’s got the lockout-exclusion instinct working very strongly. It’s a very ancient instinct, but it’s one that needs to be tempered by intellectual override in a world in which we are sharing a common destiny into the future with very, very dangerous technologies. I’m amazed at how the prime minister can go to church and pray that we be good and kind to each other, and I did hear him saying to school kiddies just yesterday that we’ve got to talk nicely to each other. But he can do such things to refugees and he can feel so happy about dividing the world into rich and poor and being part of the world that spends a trillion dollars each year on armaments, while thirty thousand kids a day die because they can’t get clean water. DO: Finally, the so-called global war on terrorism. We could speak about that all afternoon ... BB: I was very taken over Christmas to see Leunig’s cartoon which said, Don’t be alarmed, your fridge magnet is getting weak and might slide; would you mind putting your fridge on its side until we get you new ones? DO: Just one aspect of the invasion of Iraq: many have said that ultimately it’s probably economic and about oil. But that’s the one word you never hear the Coalition of the Willing use – oil. They speak about everything but oil. BB: It’s right at the heart of it. And we know that the neoliberals, as they’re called, in the White House, including George Bush, were talking about Iraq and its oil being essential to the future of America, before September 11. And September 11 became the fulcrum upon which they justified the future invasion of Iraq, even though there was no connection between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. Oil, oil oil – whereas you look at Nepal, where there’s been appalling carnage from terrorism as the Maoists fight the incumbent monarchy. All they’ve done is say to the Americans ‘get out’, and I think Colin Powell gave them two helicopters, because they have no oil. And yet geopolitically Nepal, between India and China, two nuclear powers, is extraordinarily important. But the Nepalese have made the mistake of not having an oil resource. So they’re not only not going to be invaded, they’re not going to be given anything to help themselves either. DO: Last question, Bob – again, we could probably speak about it at length – it’s very good to see that yourself and the Greens are being so strong on education, which seems to have hit rock bottom. That’s a real worry. BB: I sit there in the Senate, year after year, and see the dollars flowing away from the public school system. It began under Labor, where for the first time federal school spending became fifty-fifty. Now, even though seventy per cent of the kids are in the public school system, seventy per cent of the funds go to the private school system. Now, the private school system is a legitimate and important part of our education resource, but the fact that the public school system is left with big classes, dealing with all the troublesome kids who are shed out of the private school system as fast as you can say Jack Robinson, with a prime ministerial viewpoint which condemns the teachers, the students and by inference even the parents, is appalling. You mightn’t have been tempted to call Mr Howard a racist, but he’s become both a bully and a bigot. And to levy those things onto the public school system, as he’s done this year, is really a tragic extension of his division of the nation. The Commonwealth would need to be spending at least a billion dollars extra this coming year in the school system to be up there with the Scandinavian countries and the states would need to put in two billion on top of that, so it’s not just how the cake’s being cut. The fact is the cake is not big enough, if we’re going to adequately give kids the education they deserve. DO: It’s the tax regime that needs changing. BB: Yeah, how it’s spent. Taxation’s going to be a big issue this year, but there’s one tax you won’t hear any of them talk about: that’s a Tobin tax, whereby one thousandth of the trillion dollars a day spent by money speculation purchase and sale would be gathered internationally and given to people who haven’t got anything ... We’ve got a long way to go. I must say, though, for the sake of this – it’s an enormous privilege being in the Senate and in politics. It’s very important that we follow through and get much stronger. And that we get the opportunities to do such things as in my time be the instigator of legislation that has led to the end of imprisoning Aboriginal kids in the Northern Territory. It’s very demanding but also a rewarding position to be in. And that comes out of running into the Lake Pedder people for me thirty years ago. So I take my hat off to them, insofar as I have been able to take part in the changing political fortunes of the country. DO: Thank you Bob. BB: Thank you.
Island EDITOR DAVID OWEN INTERVIEWED SENATOR BOB BROWN FOR Island ON 6 FEBRUARY 2004
AT THE OFFICES OF THE AUSTRALIAN GREENS IN HOBART
RAPID RESPONSE EMAIL: What do you think? Monday, August 23, 2004 |