Bob Brown

Politician

A member of last year’s Same Same 25, Greens leader Bob Brown has been a powerful voice for the environment and social justice since he was elected to the Senate in 1996. 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.

"I am very honoured by the Same Same 25," says Brown. "It is my pleasure to act as an encouragement for younger gay and lesbian Australians. It is also good to be ending 2008 with national legislation to remove discrimination. We Greens will continue to work to eliminate all discrimination on the statute books including the ban on same sex marriage."

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 was 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. In his 12 years in the Senate Bob has campaigned on mandatory sentencing, the rights of asylum seekers and the rights of people with terminal illness to die with dignity.

Bob is a passionate advocate for Australia's environment whether it be the magnificent old growth forests of Tasmania, the dying wetlands of the New South Wales Macquarie Marshes or the beautiful Mary River and its ancient lungfish which is threatened by a proposal dam in Queensland. Bob has also been a passionate defender of human rights with a long record of speaking out against the war in Iraq, the illegal detention of David Hicks and for oppressed people in East Timor, West Papua, Tibet and Burma.