Bob Brown
Bob Brown
Robert James "Bob" Brownis an Australian former politician, medical doctor, and environmentalist who is a former Senator, and former Parliamentary Leader of the Australian Greens. 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 group of Australian Greens senators following the 1996 federal election. He was re-elected in 2001 and in 2007. He was the first openly gay member of the Parliament of Australia,...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth27 December 1944
CountryAustralia
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 .
In securing the future of the planet, we secure happiness for ourselves. One of the aims of the Greens is to turn around the tide of pessimism amongst the young people of the world.
I have seen such an immense change from the total repression and criminality of homosexuality in my lifetime. It does make me much more buoyant and optimistic about the future. If that change can occur in that time there's hope for many other changes.
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.
There are better alternatives, ... Australia should be exporting its solar technology, not its uranium.
Globally the Greens have arisen like a spontaneous combustion, a reaction to the narrow-minded state-backed exploitation of resources and wealth for a few at the expense of the many.
The future will either be green or not at all.
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.
Every time I get a bit worried about having made some second rate choices in life I go back and read about the Suffragettes or William Wilberforce, people who were 'wrong' in their own time, and think, 'Ah well.
We are all born bonded to nature; that's why we put depictions of flowers and forests, rather than bulldozers or log piles, on our walls.
Exxon, Coca-Cola, BHP Billiton and News Corporation have much more say in organising the global agenda than the planet's 5 billion mature-age voters without a ballot box.
So far as we know, Earth is the only planet which supports life, and it is the only planet on which we can survive. Our bodies and our minds are fashioned by it. Our hearts resonate with it. There will be little joy for the human spirit if we destroy the natural fabric of Earth with nothing left to do but go shopping. When we imagine the world a century from now, when we look our great grandchildren in the eye and see them smiling back at us because they know we cared for them, we smile too!
Seeing the whales off James Price Point, mothers, babies, bull whales, seeing the count, going up into the thousands of these whales, the assurance that they will be ok with a mega port, mega ships and a huge factory ashore, is now clearly proven wrong.
We need to move the whole pack up. But these are all learning experiences. We're just starting to get better. We're a little inconsistent right now. And when we start getting consistent, we'll start getting better.