Bob Brown (politician, 1944)

Bob Brown, leader of the Australian Greens

Robert James Brown (born December 27, 1944 in Oberon , New South Wales ) is a former Australian politician, an Australian Senator from 1996 to 2012 and Chairman of the Australian Greens until April 2012 . He is the first openly homosexual in the Australian Parliament .

Brown came into the international headlines when he was excluded from a parliamentary session on 23 October 2003 after being during a speech by George W. Bush , the diplomatic protocol disturbed by interruptions. Brown's Senate colleague Kerry Nettle has also been suspended.

Brown has been running the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society since 2012 .

Life

Bob Brown was born in Oberon. He attended Trunkey Public School and later Blacktown Boys High School , where he was also elected Head Boy in his senior year. After high school Accounts he enrolled at the University of Sydney in specialist medical one.

After graduation, he moved to Tasmania in 1972 , where he opened a general practitioner practice in Launceston .

Brown has published several books, including Wild Rivers (1983), Lake Pedder (1986), Tarkine Trails (1994), The Greens (1996) (with Peter Singer), Memo For A Saner World (2004) and Tasmania's Recherche Bay (2005 ). In 2004 James Norman published Brown's first authorized biography ( Bob Brown: A Gentle Revolutionary ).

Brown lives in Hobart with his longtime partner .

Political career

Engagement in environmental groups

Soon he began to get involved in the environmental movement, especially in the struggle to protect Lake Pedder , which is now dammed by three dams . This made him a member of the United Tasmania Group , Australia's first green party. In a newspaper interview, he first publicly confessed to his homosexuality.

In 1978 Brown was appointed director of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society . In the early 1980s he became the leader of a campaign against the construction of the Franklin Dam , which was to dam the Franklin River for the purpose of generating electricity. During a demonstration in 1983, Brown was arrested along with 1,500 other dam opponents. He then had to spend 19 days in Risdon prison in the island's capital Hobart. On the day of his release, Brown was elected to the Tasmanian Parliament. The campaign against the dam was ultimately successful after the Tasmanian government intervened with a law to protect the Franklin River Valley .

Work in the Tasmanian Parliament

During his first term, Brown brought a number of private legislative initiatives to the agenda, including freedom of information , a statutory right to "Death with Dignity", diet cuts , reform of gay rights , and a ban on battery laying hens nuclear free Tasmania. His 1987 proposal to ban semi-automatic weapons, was of the parliamentary members of the Liberal Party of Australia and the Australian Labor Party (the "House of Assembly" lower house ) rejected. Nine years later automatic weapons were banned after the " Port Arthur massacre ", in which 35 people died in a rampage .

In 1989, through proportional representation , the Greens won five of the 35 seats in the Tasmanian parliament. Brown became the unofficial party chairman, although the Australian Greens did not hold formal leadership positions at the time. The Greens agreed to support the Labor Minority Government . However, this agreement broke due to disagreements over forestry policy . In 1993, Brown resigned and tried to be elected to the Australian House of Representatives . However, this did not succeed.

Work in the Australian Senate

In 1996 Brown was elected to the Senate for Tasmania , the Australian upper house. He was an open opponent of the Conservative government under John Howard , advocating green and human rights issues, including international affairs such as Tibet , East Timor and western New Guinea . He also brought legislative proposals for constitutional reform, the protection of forests against the storage of nuclear waste , for a ban on the minimum fine regulation of Aboriginekindern and for the reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases one.

In the 2001 election, Brown's Senate seat was confirmed despite losing votes. Brown was subsequently a strong opponent of the Howard government's restrictive refugee policy. The reason for this was the dispute over the Norwegian cargo ship “MS Tampa”, which had saved several hundred mostly Afghan refugees from distress off the Christmas Islands (part of Australia). Australia stubbornly refused to accept the refugees and ultimately the tiny Pacific state of Nauru agreed to accept them at the Nauru Detention Center in return for financial concessions from the Australian side . Brown also criticized Labor opposition leader Kim Beazley for his condoning Howard's approach to the matter.

Brown is also known as a leading critic of Australia's involvement in the 2003 Iraq war among supporters of anti-war and peace groups.

Despite his rather grumpy and humorless manner, he is widely admired for his courage and conviction. An example of his tolerance and, at the same time, his dry sense of humor is his reaction to Fred Nile's intention to run for the Christian Democratic Party of Australia for the Senate in 2004. Brown was then quoted as saying, "Through him, the Greens have the opportunity to underline their philanthropic views, which has already led to a doubling of the green vote in the past three or four years." He alludes to the frequent controversial statements of the controversial politician, a pastor. He is known for his extremely negative attitude towards homosexuals and had called, among other things, that gay men should be kept in quarantine in order to contain the spread of AIDS or that Muslim women should be banned from wearing chador because they could carry weapons under it. He and Brown share a kind of intimate hostility.

When the US-American President George W. Bush visited the Australian capital Canberra on October 23, 2003 , left-wing MPs of the Labor Party wanted to express their rejection of the Iraq war with a letter addressed to him. Only Brown and his Senate colleague, Nettle, went so far as to interrupt his speech at a joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate with repeated heckling. They carried signs referring to David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, two Australian citizens who had been imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay , Cuba since their arrest in Afghanistan and Pakistan respectively (Habib has since been released). Bush met the interference with humor, but the parliament speaker ( Speaker of the House ) Neil Andrew closed it for 24 hours of meetings from. At the same time, this meant that they were unable to attend a speech by Chinese President Hu Jintao on the following day, thus preventing a possible renewed disturbance from the point of view of the Speaker of Parliament.

Brown opposed the 2004 amendment to the Marriage Act and said, "Mr. Howard should relax and accept same-sex weddings as part of future society. "

In December 2004, the timber company Gunns Limited tried to sue Brown and others for AUS $ 6.3 million . This has been viewed by the media as "persistent disruption of campaigns and activities" by political institutions. The suit was dismissed by the Supreme Court , the highest court, the costs were borne by Gunn Ltd. to wear.

On November 28, 2005, Brown was formally elected as the first parliamentary chairman of the Australian Greens. Before that, since his election as Senator in 1996, he had been de facto chairman of the Greens for more than a decade , which until then had no formal chairman.

Web links

Commons : Bob Brown  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Bob Brown's homepage
• Senator Brown's parliamentary homepage
• Speech at the National Press Club on September 25, 2001 (PDF)
• George W. Bush's speech to the Australian Parliament (PDF; 98 kB)
• Senator Brown's campaign against deforestation in the Wielangta Forest

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bob Brown will lead Sea Shepherd. In: sueddeutsche.de. January 8, 2013, accessed July 11, 2018 . 
2. ↑ http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2013/01/08/sea-shepherd-s-founder-watson-steps-down
3. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from July 20, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/27/1082831558618.html?from=storylhs