the Greens

the Greens, Australian environmentalist political party founded in 1992. It had its origins in the United Tasmania Group (UTG), one of the world’s first Green political parties.

The environmental movement of the 1960s in Australia was primarily made up of small groups until a proposed hydroelectric project that would have flooded and enlarged Tasmania’s Lake Pedder spurred the locals to collective action. Meeting at the Hobart town hall in 1972, the UTG formulated a charter that emphasized sustainable growth, peaceful resolution of conflict, and preservation of natural resources. While the campaign to preserve Lake Pedder ultimately failed, a few years later the UTG joined with the Tasmanian Wilderness Society (TWS) to quickly mobilize opposition to a hydroelectric plant that was planned for the Gordon River below its confluence with the Franklin River. When the UTG dissolved in 1979, TWS leader Bob Brown launched a nationwide “No Dams” campaign against the initiative, turning public opinion against further hydroelectric development in southwest Tasmania. The Franklin was permanently protected with the creation of a national park in 1981, and the Tasmanian Wilderness was designated a World Heritage site in 1982. The following year Brown won a seat in the Tasmanian parliament, becoming the first Green elected to that body.

The spirit of the UTG carried on with a succession of Green independent candidates, four of whom won seats in the Tasmanian parliament throughout the 1980s. The Green independent coalition served as the junior partner in a minority government with the Australian Labor Party in Tasmania from 1989 to 1992. Green parties also began to appear on the mainland, and in 1992 three of the individual state parties gathered under the umbrella of the Greens. In 1996 Brown became the first member of the Green party to be elected to the Australian Senate, and he was soon joined by others. In 2010 Adam Bandt won the Greens’ first seat (Melbourne, Vic.) in Australia’s House of Representatives. In the extremely close Australian federal election of 2010, in which neither Labor nor the Liberal-Nationals coalition won an outright majority, Bandt and three independents chose to back Labor and enable it to form a minority government.

In the early 21st century the Greens endeavoured to present themselves as more than a single-issue party. At the national level, they advocated for reform of Australia’s immigration and refugee policies, gay rights, and increased representation of indigenous peoples in all levels of government.