Greens leader Bob Brown is a rare creature in Australian politics: a man who commands wide respect for his political idealism, has an unwavering loyalty to nature and who is openly homosexual too.

Brown began his political life when he joined Australia’s first green group, the United Tasmania Group, in 1972 to save Lake Pedder, which was also when he came out. Later, as a major proponent in the movement to save Tasmania’s mighty Franklin River from being dammed, Brown was locked in Hobart’s Risdon Prison for nineteen days in 1983 and went on to become a member of the Tasmanian Parliament on the day he was released.

Along with a range of other essential reforms, Brown started Tasmania’s ten year road to gay law reform which began in the eighties and which eventually resulted by the nineties in Tasmania having the most progressive legislation of this kind in the entire country.

In 1989 Brown became the Greens’ first leader and by 1996 was elected to the Australian Senate for Tasmania, and has since been a much needed voice of opposition to the grey mediocrity of John Howard, especially when there was very little being provided by Labor’s Kim Beazley.

Brown was re-elected to the Senate in 2001 with an even larger vote and has continued to criticise Australia’s involvement in Iraq, our treatment of refugees and the government’s slow reaction to global warming.

So well known is he for being progressive that The Chaser boys joked on their website that Brown has skipped MySpace and Facebook for his electronic election campaign to sign up with Bebo.com.

By Danny Corvini