REVIEW BY RACHEL EVANS
Bob Brown: Gentle Revolutionary
By James Norman Allen & Unwin, 2004
232 pages, $29.95
I grew up with parents who loved bicycles, bush walked madly and stuck "No dams" stickers everywhere. This book made me realise where they came from. They were a product of the rising environment movement that Bob Brown led during the 1980s.
James Norman's book sheds some light on the Greens, their rise to political prominence and the important role played by Brown.
Brown grew up in rural NSW and at 12 he became aware of his homosexual orientation. Being shy, gay and growing up in the sexually conservative 1950s was difficult. However Brown excelled in school, finding an inspiring communist history teacher. She was one of "those special teachers who actually speaks to students like they are equal people".
After two sexually liberating years in London, Brown took up medical practice in Launceston and was shocked at Lake Pedder's flooding. The campaign led to the formation of the world's first green party, the United Tasmania Group (UTG), in early 1972. Work saving Pedder "set the template for saving the Franklin", Brown assessed.
In 1977, Brown gave up doctoring and applied himself to opposing the Franklin Dam. In late 1977 he was elected unopposed as the Tasmanian Wilderness Society (TWS) director. Brown lobbied for financial support for the rising Franklin campaign from the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) — which, as Norman explained, "had been notoriously impotent throughout the Lake Pedder campaign".
From just 16 people, by 1980 TWS had a new office in Hobart's CBD and more than 1000 paid-up members. TWS rallies in Hobart against the dam drew 10,000 people. Melbourne and Sydney protests attracted record numbers. In a 1981 Tasmanian referendum on the dam, 45% voted informal, as advocated by TWS; 47% supported the Gordon-below-Franklin damming option and 8% supported damming the Olga.
Brown ran in the election saying, "I'm not a career politician, I'm not a politician in the conventional sense at all". He was the highest vote winner to miss out on gaining a seat. Then, the Hare-Clarke system in Tasmania allowed each electorate to choose seven members by proportional representation, making it easier for smaller parties to gain representation. Today, five members are elected from each electorate.
Robin Gray's Liberal Party won a landslide victory, and led bulldozers into the Gordon in late July 1982. TWS initiated a mass human blockade on December 14 of that year. Four-thousand people took part and 1400 people were arrested. Brown joined the ranks of those imprisoned for 19 days.
A late 1982 Sydney Morning Herald poll showed that 75% of Australians opposed the dam.
In February 1983, a double-dissolution federal election was called. ALP leader Bob Hawke assured TWS that the ALP would not dam the Franklin. When the election was announced, 20,000 Hobartians rallied to save the Franklin.
The ALP won the federal election and Gray launched a High Court challenge, which was defeated 4-3 in July 1983. Brown heralded the "people's victory". Gray immediately pushed two dam proposals, and Brown, who had taken a position in Tasmania's House of Assembly in January 1983, was the only one to oppose them in state parliament. Hawke funded the two dams. National media coverage was minimal, campaign activists were exhausted and the dams proceeded.
Brown courageously announced his homosexuality in his first speech to parliament. He tried to introduce gay law reform but couldn't get another parliamentarian to second his motion.
In 1989, five Green independents won seats in the state parliament, denying either major party a majority. They negotiated an accord with the ALP — the "Green-Labor accord", under which the Greens agreed to support the ALP minority government in exchange for Labor granting some policy concessions to the Green independents. As a result, some areas of Tasmania were World Heritage listed, but the Greens controversially supported Labor cuts to the public sector. The Accord fell apart in October 1990 when the ALP failed to honour its commitment to limit woodchipping in native forests.
Norman endeavours to put a positive spin on the episode by arguing: "After the accord fell apart, the Green independents proved that the ALP was now in a volatile state as a minority government. They voted with the opposition on a number of issues, notably trimming a list of schools earmarked by the ALP for closure right back to almost half the original number."
However, the accord with the ALP cost the Greens badly. Labor decisively lost the February 1992 elections and the Green vote also declined substantially.
Norman doesn't make mention of the fact, pointed out by Lisa Macdonald in Green Politics at an Impasse (available online from <http://www.dsp.org.au>), that "Brown later admitted that a majority of party supporters and movement activists had advised against signing the accord, and justifies ignoring them on the grounds of an overriding need for 'stable government'".
In fact, Brown and other Greens leaders defend the experience of the Green Labor accord to this day — despite its disastrous results.
The same conservatism marked the eventual formation of the Australian Greens as a national political party in 1992.
Norman reports uncritically that "it was agreed that members of the Greens couldn't simultaneously be members of other political parties, effectively trimming the divisive Socialist Workers Party element". (The Socialist Workers Party is now called the Democratic Socialist Perspective, one of the founding groups of, and now a tendency within, the Socialist Alliance.)
Norman then cites parliamentary staffer Ben Oquist as saying that the "rule about not being in another party was just one of those great things that really helped us move forward" and that "I'd seen how destructive the socialist element could be". Thus Norman makes crystal-clear that the purpose of the proscription clause that bars members of other parties from joining the Greens was (and remains today) to exclude an organised socialist current from forming in the Greens. This may have increased electoral support for the Greens from more conservative voters, although this should not be overstated — there certainly have been electorally successful formations like the Spanish United Left and the Brazilian Workers Party that include organised socialist currents.
However, the proscription policy certainly hasn't helped the Greens stay on the path of radical social change promised by their founding principles — arguably a more important goal. Strategic discussion and debates are bound to occur within the Greens as the party achieves greater parliamentary influence. The proscription policy means that left-wing Greens will be in a weaker position when these debates do occur.
One positive feature of the book is that it draws out the links between the success of the campaign to save the Franklin River and other progressive campaigns in Tasmania, particularly the campaign to win gay rights. Norman points out that the Tasmanian Gay and Lesbian Rights Group used similar mass action tactics in its ultimately successful campaign.
While Brown himself has never been a gay-rights activist, he attempted to pass sex-discrimination legislation giving equal rights to homosexuals in regard to superannuation, property law and will entitlement.
Norman's book is readable and intriguing and is at its best as a record of the rise of the Greens and an account of Brown's role. However the book does not ask the hard questions about parliamentary strategy and radical change. Those wanting a critical discussion about the role of Green politics in the struggle for fundamental social change will have to look elsewhere.
From Green Left Weekly, March 9, 2005.
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