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Bob Brown

  Eyewitness to the whale wars

At Sea with the Whale Pirates

By Sam Vincent
Captain Siddharth Chakravarty, the Indian skipper of Sea Shepherd’s flagship Steve Irwin, hasn’t moved in two hours. “Somebody hand me a bottle to pee in!” he demands. Sneakered and irreverent, he stands with one hand on the Steve’s steering lever, the other clutching a thermos of coffee. A loudspeaker suddenly blares to starboard. The bottle will have to wait.
January 2013

The Gillard Agreement

By Mungo MacCallum
So Greens leader Christine Milne is unimpressed with Julia Gillard’s bargaining skills.“The Prime Minister is always cited as a great negotiator but I have pointed out that it’s not about whether you get an agreement, it’s about whether the agreement you get actually delivers,” Senator Milne chided recently.She was referring to the Mineral Resources Rent Tax, and she obviously has a
How the Franklin was saved

Environmental Flows

By Bob Brown
Thirty summers ago, on 14 December, the blockade of the Franklin Dam site began. Tasmania’s Liberal government, then headed by premier Robin Gray, who once described the Franklin River as a “brown leech-ridden ditch”, had turned down a $500 million offer from prime minister Malcolm Fraser to forgo the dam. Instead Gray sent the bulldozers rumbling into the valley, and Fraser decided against direct intervention. Representing the Wi
The pursuit of character over substance

Junk politics

By Mungo MacCallum
Does it really matter whether Tony Abbott, some 35 years ago, punched a wall on either side of the head of Barbara Ramjan? Well, yes, it must, because Tony Abbott himself has told us so. In any sane and rational world such hi-jinks, however sexist and offensive they may appear now, would be dismissed as the excesses of youth, to be forgiven and forgotten by
The Australian Greens Party

Divided We Fall

By Sally Neighbour
*Nine days after the Christmas drinks in Canberra, a far more toxic atmosphere prevails as the NSW Greens assemble for their bi-monthly meeting of the State Delegates Council (SDC) at the Indigenous Yaama Dhiyaan centre in Darlington. It’s been a tortuous ye

Comment: Political Leadership in Australia

By Don Watson
As the bosses’ grip grows tighter, the membership declines and branches fold. Recently, the stalwart Senator John Faulkner used the word ‘anaemia’ to describe his party’s present condition. Leaping to his side, Kevin Rudd, who was deposed in a factiona
The Rise of the Greens

Comment

By Robert Manne
It is not often recognised how well suited the Australian electoral system is for the emergence of significant ‘third force’ parties like the Greens. In the Senate, proportional representation gives such parties a reasonable chance of winning seats. In the House of

'Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania's Forests' by Anna Krien

By John Birmingham
Tasmania is another country, sometimes another world. To move beyond the edge of settlement, which largely peters out a short drive from the fairytale towns of Hobart and Launceston, is to pass into an antipodean Middle Earth.As quickly becomes clear in Into t
The Same Dirty Old Energy

In the Dark?

By John Birmingham
The Mays own and run Solartec, a boutique renewable-energy company specialising in solar panels. Phil May, a country boy, didn't start out as a "tree-hugging type", according to the company's homey, avuncular website. He more or less blundered into renewable energy as a
A Profile of Senator Milne

Green Christine

By Amanda Lohrey
Milne is delayed, which gives me a moment to enjoy the view from her office. It's a big glassed-in semicircle that looks down the Derwent River towards the Great Southern Ocean, where ice is melting at a more accelerated rate than was predicted even five years
The tragedy of Tasmania’s forests

Out of Control

By Richard Flanagan
Clearfelling, as the name suggests, first involves the complete felling of a forest by chainsaws and skidders. Then, the whole area is torched, the firing started by helicopters dropping incendiary devices made of jellied petroleum, commonly known as napalm. T

Fierce Creatures

By Gideon Haigh
Terrifying and unpredictable, or benign and sweet-natured? Not to be trifled with, or a legitimate source of wonder? We can learn much from Steve Irwin's death about the behaviour of that strange, capricious, mysteriously abundant yet increasingly endangered species, th
The Politics of Water in the Sunshine State

There’s Something About Mary

By John Harms
Farmers have done well in this valley for generations, and newer residents, seeking a green change, have also helped the region prosper. Kaili Parker-Price was feeling confident that the future was rosy; that all could benefit from the economic development and tourism that her group was trying to foster.When she was close to home, the 10 pm news came on. "Th

The 2005 Chutzpah Awards

By Shane Maloney