Bob Brown-Gentle Revolutionalist

[Goodrum]

The woman stood in the house of Representatives to claim she had come to Canberra to bring some common sense as a "mother of four children, as a sole parent and as a businesswoman running a fish-and-chip shop". It was the afternoon of September 10, 1996, and Pauline Hanson, for better or for worse, was being hailed as the new force in Australian politics.

At the same time as Hanson wittered on about how good Aborigines in Australia had it, an openly gay man with no children stood in an almost empty Senate to deliver his vision. In his deep and reassuring voice, like rain on a tin roof, Bob Brown outlined the enormous challenges we faced living on a planet collapsing under the weight of human activity. "The future will either be green," he stated, "or not at all." Hanson's speech sparked a bushfire, while his was barely reported, and now all that remains of her is a charred stump.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/the-m ... z1irVBzOTL

Wikipedia introduction:

Robert James Brown (born 27 December 1944) is an Australian senator, the inaugural Parliamentary Leader of the Australian Greens and was the first openly gay member of the Parliament of Australia. Brown was elected to the Australian Senate on the Tasmanian Greens ticket, joining with sitting Greens Western Australia senator Dee Margetts to form the first Australian Greens senators following the 1996 federal election. He was re-elected in 2001 and again in 2007.

While serving in the Tasmanian parliament, Brown successfully campaigned for a large increase in the protected wilderness areas. Brown has led the Australian Greens since the party was founded in 1992 until the present, a period of growth to poll today at around 10% at state and federal levels (13.9% of the primary vote in 2010). From 2002 to 2004 when minor parties held the balance of power in the Senate, Brown became a well-recognised politician. In October 2003 Brown was the subject of international media interest when he was suspended from the parliament for interjecting during an address by George Bush, then United States president.

[Goodrum]

It's the Greens, led by Brown, that are the new political reality in Australia, a seemingly permanent, menacing force for the once cosy two-party system, mauling Labor's left flank and gnawing away at softer morsels of conservative flesh. In 1996 fewer than 350,000 Australians voted Green in the Senate. By the last election, that had grown four-fold to almost 1.7 million votes, compared to 4.5 million for Labor and 4.9 million for the conservatives. The Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate with nine senators and a crucial seat in the lower house. And now each week that parliament sits, Bob Brown gets to plonk his sensible shoes beneath Prime Minister Julia Gillard's desk for a cup of tea and a chat about the direction of the nation.

"I am having a ball," says Brown, 66, as we talk in his Parliament House office. He's a man who often forgets to eat and so his face is all sinew and smile. "I am having too much fun to retire." He flippantly says that Rupert Murdoch - his nemesis - is somewhat of an icon, still going strong at 80.


By any reckoning his has been a remarkable life. He was born a twin, the shy son of a country policeman, who went to university to become a doctor. He moved to Tasmania in a mad search for the thylacine. As a 32-year-old doctor in conservative rural Tasmania, way back in 1976, when even Elton John had girlfriends, he publicly declared his homosexuality so others might be spared his "years of misery". He turned his back on a medical career to lead the seven-year campaign to save the Franklin River from being dammed. He was the driving force behind The Wilderness Society. He transformed the Tasmanian Greens, and then the Australian Greens, into an electoral power and has fostered new Green parties around the world. Along the way he has been bashed with a tyre lever, shot at and jailed. In 1990, he won a $50,000 environment prize and donated the money to save a patch of Tasmanian forest from loggers, and Bush Heritage Australia was born. The organisation has since raised more than $100 million to buy almost one million hectares of high-conservation-value private land in Australia.

[Goodrum]

The Canadian scientist and conservationist Dr David Suzuki describes Brown as a global treasure, up there with "Mandela and the Dalai Lama - a person of the greatest integrity and courage, a person who has inspired others through his lifetime commitment". Conversely, the Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce says behind Brown's public image as a "benevolent uncle" there's a "ruthless, pragmatic, artful politician", while the Liberal senator Eric Abetz says he wrecked the Tasmanian economy and is now causing the same havoc on the mainland.

There's venom in Abetz's voice when he talks of Brown. The veteran political commentator Alan Ramsay says this is typical, as Brown is widely loathed by politicians from both major parties.

"He represents everything that they are not," Ramsay tells me. "He is a man of conviction, a thoroughly honest man, a man of principle. They see in him what they want to be and they hate him for it." Ramsay adds, "The big put-down is always, 'Oh, Bob Brown, he's too f...king good to be true.' They all want to find a dark corner there somewhere - well, there isn't any."

The Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan, a friend of Brown's, says that in 2004 he was on the election trail with both prime ministerial contenders, John Howard and Mark Latham. Along the way, he asked all the political staffers and journalists to tell him one positive human story about either man. He came away without a single anecdote.

"It was at that point I sort of realised that people like Bob are not so common in politics," he says. "Bob is a man before he is a politician - he exists for other people. Like anyone who knows him, I can tell you dozens of lovely stories about him doing things for others ... Look at what he did for Nigel Brennan."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/the-m ... z1irXExy7d

[Goodrum]

Brown quietly slipped away into his office for 10 minutes. He emerged with an envelope. "My daily missive," he said. It was a letter to Paul. He sends one each day they are apart.

("Mostly they say he is looking forward to getting home," Thomas tells me. "He tells me how he's feeling and then there are little observations, like there was snow on the mountains as he flew over.")

At the heart of Brown is an angst and an optimism. He works his way through his turmoils, be it about his own sexuality or the future of the planet, as he has always done, by resolving to do something to somehow make it better.

His mother, Marjorie, the daughter of a dairy farmer, and his father, Jack, a policeman, were loving, caring people, and although he was close to them and his brothers and twin sister, he was also an outsider in the family. He was the dreamy kid who found solace wandering the bush or reading and remembering endless facts from encyclopaedias. "At a high-speed-rail conference the other day I could still rattle it all off: 'Sydney 1947, population 1.4 million, 24th biggest city in the world. Australia's population 7.7 million ...' "

[Goodrum]

Brown spent much of his youth in an excruciating internal battle with his sexuality. "I couldn't talk about it with anyone," he says. "Never." The family moved around rural NSW to wherever his father was posted: Oberon, Trunkey Creek, Armidale. Then, to add to the confusion, he was one of a group of boys who were fondled by a teacher at an Armidale primary school when he was 12. The police were called, the teacher was charged and, of course, everyone in town knew of the scandal. "My good, good parents," he says as we pass through a one-teacher village like those of his early years, "they didn't make a fuss. They didn't talk about it, but my father got a transfer and moved the family to Bellingen."

Judy Henderson, a life-long friend whom he met as a teenager, tells me that while Brown was very shy, he was a popular student and a good athlete and would befriend kids who were bullied. The pair would catch the train each day to high school in Coffs Harbour and would have long and earnest conversations about what they wanted to do with their lives. Brown, she says, always wanted to do something worthy and thought medicine would be a good way of helping others. She was unaware of his struggle with his sexuality, even at university. "It was a different age and something we'd never have conceived of," she says.

Several times he considered killing himself. "I remember walking down Parramatta Road to Sydney University and thinking, 'If I ever get out of this alive I am going to speak up about it,'" Brown says. He moved to London for a few years and talked to a counsellor who suggested that rather than trying to cure himself, he may be better off just accepting that he was gay. He worked through his angst and in 1976 gave an interview, at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Tasmania, to The Examiner in Launceston under the headline Doctor Says He's Gay: "Many young people are going through a great deal of trauma over something for which they are not to blame," Dr Brown told the newspaper.

[Goodrum]

That is now in part reflected in a small self-published book Brown launched - with the help of TV host Rove McManus - at Parliament House.

The book, Earth, is a collection of Brown's photography adorned with some small instances poetry.

Brown told a small collection of Greens and journalists who turned up to the launch the book was a reflection of his love for the planet, the people on the planet, and the ecosystems that make it up.

Brown has struggled to get the book together. Five book publishers rejected the idea before he self-published it.

McManus was no ring in either. He is one of two international vice-presidents of Fauna and Flora International, the other being Sir David Attenborough.

"I am not launching this book because I feel sorry for Bob because he is from Tasmania," Rove McManus said, laughing at his own joke.

McManus continues - "when Bob asked me to launch the book I said to him 'does this mean I have to read it?' Bob told me it was a book of photographs and I said I'm in."

Brown thanked McManus for launching the book, because he brought humour to the event.

"It is not something (humour) I have bucket loads of," Brown said. McManus later signed copies of the book. Goanna's copy is signed by McManus saying "I just turned up today, that's about it, really..."

Brown is no stranger to publishing books - he is the author of six others. The most famous of which is The Greens, a history of the Australian environment movement co-written with philosopher and one-time Greens candidate Peter Singer.

But Brown's latest effort is calmer. Brown said it was supposed to be a positive book and a reflection of his belief that humans and the planet are one, and need each other.

Brown told a story about his friend, naturalist David Suzuki, who turned up to a supermarket to find a sign saying "no animals"

"David then drove down the road to another supermarket who would serve him," Brown said laughing.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/ ... z1irZJM3qA

[Goodrum]

I think Bob Brown is an Idealist, am thinking attentive Idealist, possibly more contending than responder, still a little grey on that:

Brown is at ease with the limelight these days but for many years seems to have found life itself a struggle. As a new biography, Bob Brown: Gentle Revolutionary by James Norman makes clear, he fought bouts of depression as a young man which occasionally bordered on the suicidal.

Brown was a shy child, the son of a country policeman , the odd one out in a family where his brothers (one older, one younger) and twin sister Jan, as well as four uncles were all at various times in the police force.

The family was politically conservative, revering Bob Menzies and the royals, steeped in the conventional values of the '40s and '50s. Not an easy environment for a youth battling the realisation of his homosexuality.

His early years were spent in the one-pub town of Trunkey Creek in NSW, where 26 children attended the local school. He was the family dreamer, spending hours wandering the paddocks and the bush surrounding the family home.

"I was a bit of a deep thinker all the way through," Brown says. "I think I could have been quite difficult to fathom as a youngster, this kid who didn't talk about himself very much."

Brown was exceptionally close to his mother, Marjorie, but feels in hindsight that his father, Jack, also had a beneficial influence. "I saw him dealing as a policeman with extremely difficult situations, being very practical about life." Jack was also a fine musician who played saxophone in the police band and travelled around to local town hall dances.

Brown excelled at school, moving from Trunkey Creek to Armidale when he was eight. But life there shuddered to a halt after authorities discovered a teacher had been fondling a number of the younger pupils, including Brown.

The family abruptly uprooted to Bellingen, then later to Windsor in outer Sydney, where Brown finished school as captain of Blacktown Boys High. His marks were good enough to get him into medicine at Sydney University, but he found student life miserable.

For the next few years he bottled up his personal crisis, at one point, as Norman's book documents, putting himself through painful aversion therapy. "My hands were wired to an electric shock machine. Each male on the screen was followed by a shock. The occasional female was followed by the relief of no shock at all ... Inside I was dying away," Brown says in the book.

In 1972 , after troubled periods as a GP in Canberra, London and Sydney, Brown fled to Tasmania to take up a medical locum's job. He fell in thrall to the dramatic landscape, and joined a months-long and fruitless hunt for a thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), last seen alive in the '30s. His life took on an ascetic cast.

His earlier biographer, Peter Thompson of ABC's Radio National, wrote that Brown "no longer wanted to hold on to things ... He was always giving away books and anything unnecessary about the house, even ... his precious camera."

But in 1976 came the journey that was to remake him in every way - a rafting trip down the Franklin River in the heart of Tasmania's untamed South West, which was then threatened by plans to dam it.

The experience was almost biblical. Brown went into the wilderness and came out, it seems, healed within himself and with a new mission in life. He began quietly declaring his sexuality to close friends, and embarked on the impassioned anti-dams campaign which eventually brought him to national prominence.

Over the years he'd wrestled with and finally abandoned conventional notions of God, fretted about nuclear annihilation and been deeply troubled by the ailments, spiritual and physical, he had seen in his city patients.

"This stuff had been searing my brain. I went down the Franklin River and saw the beauty of it and thought 'What's the point of knocking down the forests and building more dams to make more tranquilliser factories?'," he tells the Herald.

In 1983, writing from Hobart's Risdon Jail where he had been sent briefly for his part in an anti-dams protest, Brown wrote: "I am not a conventionally religious man, but in the wilderness I have come closest to finding myself and knowing the universe and accepting God - by which I mean accepting all that I don't know."

[Goodrum]

Of the future, he has committed himself to standing for the Senate at least once more (he is not up for re-election this time because his term expires in 2007). It's hard to see him retiring from public life even after that.

Says Peter Thompson: "There's a tension between him wanting the fantasy of a quieter, reflective life, writing philosophy, and this need to be involved and have his life affirmed in this bigger way.

"If there's a negative to his missionary zeal, it's that he's never really had to balance things. He's brilliant as a catalyst, but it might be very fortunate that he's never needed to be a minister in government."

His Global Parliament Speech:

Fellow Earthians,

Never before has the Universe unfolded such a flower as our collective human intelligence, so far as we know.

Nor has such a one-and-only brilliance in the Universe stood at the brink of extinction, so far as we know.

We people of the Earth exist because our potential was there in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, as the Universe exploded into being.

So far, it seems like we are the lone thinkers in this vast, expanding Universe.

However, recent astronomy tells us that there are trillions of other planets circling Sunlike stars in the immensity of the Universe, millions of them friendly to life. So why has no one from elsewhere in the Cosmos contacted us?

Surely some people-like animals have evolved elsewhere. Surely we are not, in this crowded reality of countless other similar planets, the only thinking beings to have turned up. Most unlikely! So why isn't life out there contacting us? Why aren't the intergalactic phones ringing?

Rest is here:

http://greensmps.org.au/content/news-st ... en-oration

[Goodrum]

Brown was a shy child, the son of a country policeman , the odd one out in a family where his brothers (one older, one younger) and twin sister Jan, as well as four uncles were all at various times in the police force.

The family was politically conservative, revering Bob Menzies and the royals, steeped in the conventional values of the '40s and '50s. Not an easy environment for a youth battling the realisation of his homosexuality.

His early years were spent in the one-pub town of Trunkey Creek in NSW, where 26 children attended the local school. He was the family dreamer, spending hours wandering the paddocks and the bush surrounding the family home.

"I was a bit of a deep thinker all the way through," Brown says. "I think I could have been quite difficult to fathom as a youngster, this kid who didn't talk about himself very much."

Brown was exceptionally close to his mother, Marjorie, but feels in hindsight that his father, Jack, also had a beneficial influence. "I saw him dealing as a policeman with extremely difficult situations, being very practical about life."
Brown excelled at school..His marks were good enough to get him into medicine at Sydney University, but he found student life miserable.

For the next few years he bottled up his personal crisis, at one point, as Norman's book documents, putting himself through painful aversion therapy. "My hands were wired to an electric shock machine. Each male on the screen was followed by a shock. The occasional female was followed by the relief of no shock at all ... Inside I was dying away," Brown says in the book.

In 1972 , after troubled periods as a GP in Canberra, London and Sydney, Brown fled to Tasmania to take up a medical locum's job. He fell in thrall to the dramatic landscape, and joined a months-long and fruitless hunt for a thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), last seen alive in the '30s. His life took on an ascetic cast.

His earlier biographer, Peter Thompson of ABC's Radio National, wrote that Brown "no longer wanted to hold on to things ... He was always giving away books and anything unnecessary about the house, even ... his precious camera."

But in 1976 came the journey that was to remake him in every way - a rafting trip down the Franklin River in the heart of Tasmania's untamed South West, which was then threatened by plans to dam it.

The experience was almost biblical. Brown went into the wilderness and came out, it seems, healed within himself and with a new mission in life. He began quietly declaring his sexuality to close friends, and embarked on the impassioned anti-dams campaign which eventually brought him to national prominence.

Over the years he'd wrestled with and finally abandoned conventional notions of God, fretted about nuclear annihilation and been deeply troubled by the ailments, spiritual and physical, he had seen in his city patients....Says Peter Thompson: "There's a tension between him wanting the fantasy of a quieter, reflective life, writing philosophy, and this need to be involved and have his life affirmed in this bigger way.

"If there's a negative to his missionary zeal, it's that he's never really had to balance things. He's brilliant as a catalyst, but it might be very fortunate that he's never needed to be a minister in government".

...but he does seem to be advocating, for people, for nature, for government, for people's rights, asylum seekers, humanity, advocate for world parliament:

It is hard to be a political visionary. The first suffragettes, fighting for women's right to vote, were seen as a fanatic minority. The first anti-slavery activists were seen as crazy extremists. The first white anti-Apartheid advocates in South Africa were seen as traitors. History, however, has a very different view of these people.

Senator Bob Brown's support for a world parliament has recently been criticised. History, I believe, will see him differently: a realistic and far-sighted global leader, an inspiration to future generations.

Brown has not just stated his support for a world parliament, he also actively advocates it. The debate in Australia that followed his speech at the National Press Club conveniently ignores that Brown and the Australian Greens aren't alone in doing so. In fact they are part of a growing global movement that is supported by a truly cross-partisan alliance. In October 2010 Brown joined over 700 members of parliament in signing an international appeal. The appeal calls for the establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly. This appeal is endorsed by many distinguished individuals such as Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a former UN Secretary-General; Mike Moore, a former head of the WTO and former New Zealand prime minister; Vaclav Havel, former Czech president and over 200 university professors.

[Goodrum]

Bob Brown-Gentle Revolutionary

Australia must prioritise education spending. It is not a question of whether or not we have the money, it is a question of how we choose to spend it.
Bob Brown

There is a spiritual side to our connection with the planet. And in this material world, that's anathema. It is somewhat worrying. What I say.. it makes life. It gives us fulfilment. It makes us whole human beings. And without it, we make mistakes. And, boy, are the leaders of the world making mistakes at the moment.
Bob Brown

With a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the Iraq war, the US and Australia could ensure every starving, sunken-eyed child on the planet could be well fed, have clean water and sanitation and a local school to go to.
Bob Brown

Renewable energy is proven technology, the price is dropping, the rest of the world is going that way, that's where our investment should be going as well.
Bob Brown

We must have an expansionary vision, one that captures the imagination and diversity of the whole community, one which befits a nation which has moved beyond the basics of literacy and numeracy and which wants to develop a learning culture, to affirm its democratic traditions and give expression to the diversity and vibrance of its community through its public education system. Putting optimism for everyone back into Australia’s future depends on it.
Bob Brown

The Greens will continue to champion a fairer society rather than simply the economy and to champion the parliament rather than simply the stock exchange.
Bob Brown

He doesn't sound so much Mentoring, Counselor, he really does sound, be, an Advocating, Reconciler Idealist, of causes, for causes, for people, for humanity, for earth.

There are many democratic virtues, among them courage, honesty, mercy, tolerance, but the cardinal democratic virtue is humility. For three decades, Bob Brown has been her champion. His Murdoch newspaper critics have consistently mis-described him as a “crackpot” and “dangerous obsessive”. The ABC’s Annabel Crabb sees him as a “conviction politician”. Both perspectives overlook his most striking quality: humility.

The son of a country policeman, he’s one of those rare politicians who grasped right from the beginning that those who trumpet their own humility suffer from its lack. But the man who once heckled President George W. Bush in a joint parliamentary session demonstrated that humility is never meek, docile, or submissive; contrary to popular wisdom, humility is their foe.

It takes guts.

2003 Rebel: Brown resorts to the telecast of Chinese President Hu Jintao addressing a joint session of Parliament after being expelled from the chamber for 24 hours, as punishment for heckling President George W. Bush Alan Porritt/AAP.

So what is humility? From the campaign against the Franklin Dam which landed him in prison through to recent efforts to rein in carbon polluters and mining companies, Brown showed that humility requires living honestly, without political illusions.

Brown faced trainloads of abuse during his time in politics, but he consistently reminded his opponents that we human beings are dwellers on earth (from humus, from which the word humility also derives). Humble people draw breath from that connection. That’s why he once fasted for a week on Mount Wellington as an anti-nuclear activist and why he’s soon off to test his hiking skills in the mountains of Tasmania. Brown showed that humility strengthens the powerless.

Humility is a social virtue; it helps people ‘be themselves’. It is also a generous virtue, the opposite of haughty hunger for power over others. That’s why Brown balked at humiliation, shunned showy arrogance and all forms of aggressiveness.

Humility for him implied equality: it stands opposed to all forms of human bossing and violent rule, including human attempts to dominate the biosphere in which we dwell.

During our interview last year in Canberra, I thought I’d test Bob Brown by asking him whether he worried the aphrodisiac power would rush to his head after taking control of the Senate. Wouldn’t it fan the coals of arrogant pride? Contradict his political reputation for decency, openness, fairness? Turn him into a political celebrity? I’ve asked the question to scores of politicians before.

Not one ever replied as he did that afternoon.

Unflinching, deadpan, he visibly meant what he said: “In a decade or two from now, I’ll be dead. To think that in some way or other, celebrity is going to be the fulfilling thing in life is to head for a crash. I just think doing what you can in an extraordinary circumstance on a planet that is in real trouble is the most fulfilling thing available”.

That is the meaning of life.

I 'think' Healer, but with a dose of Contending, he seems to have with George Bush, but we can do that.. Possibly Contender Idealist.