Fifty years ago, at a rowdy meeting at the Hobart town hall, the world’s first “green” party was formed.
While the word Green was not officially used, and it would take some time for the United Tasmania Group to be formally registered as a political party, it was the beginning of an organised effort to use the political system to push for a spotlight on environmental issues.
The UTG was born of a desire to stop the state’s powerful Hydro Electric Commission from flooding pristine Lake Pedder, in the state’s rugged south-west wilderness. And, for that fight, the UTG deserves formal recognition as the first green political party to contest an election anywhere in the world.
Both the Labor and Liberal parties were committed to the Hydro’s policy of damming every wild river in the state to generate cheap electricity.
The fight for Lake Pedder had been brewing ever since the Menzies government funded a road cut into the south-west wilderness, putting conservationists on high alert.
There was nothing quite like Pedder anywhere – a glacial outwash Lake, with a mile-long beach of pink quartzite sand, and a dozen endemic species. The natural wonder came to be recognised nationally and internationally.
Compounding the sense of grief and outrage, the dam made no economic sense: Tassie had enough power and the Hydro was only proposing to use the Lake as dead water storage. At a Hobart exhibition by the passionate nature photographer Olegas Truchanas – simply slides of his pictures of Pedder, set to the music of Sibelius – people walked out in tears.
Dr Richard Jones, a former vice-president of the Queensland Country Party, was a botanical scientist who moved to the University of Tasmania in 1970. After visiting Pedder he began working with the Lake Pedder Action Committee.
For Jones, Pedder was symptomatic of a wider problem. As he wrote in one 1971 lecture: “Concern for the environment is completely unrepresented in our governments.” One of the original campaigners, geomorphologist Kevin Kiernan, described Jones as one of the most strategic thinkers he had ever met – a real “chess master”.
In Sydney, Milo Dunphy had been the first dedicated conservationist to run for parliament in Australia, contesting the New South Wales state election in 1971. Dunphy joined the Lake Pedder campaign and, after twice visiting Tasmania, wrote heartfelt letters to Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian calling for the flooding to be halted.
Dunphy, Jones and Kiernan were constantly in touch by letter. In February 1972, Dunphy got word that the sole Centre party member of the Tasmanian parliament, Kevin Lyons, was about to cross the floor, robbing the Bethune Liberal government of its single-seat majority and almost certainly forcing an election.
The Colong Committee, which Dunphy was a member of, minuted plans to run “total environment” candidates in Tasmania, and Dunphy announced that the Lake Pedder Action Committee would fly him down to Hobart to help run the campaign. When the election was called, a meeting was scheduled at the Hobart town hall for 23 March, with ads running in the Mercury featuring the stylised triangles – representing the saw-toothed “mega-ripples” of the lake’s edge – that would become the logo of the new UTG.
Jones and his mates had word that the Hydro had planned to stack the hall with 200 engineers. And there was plenty of rowdy and fiery debate that evening.
But eventually, there was support for the landmark resolution: “In order that there is a maximum usage of a unique political opportunity to save Lake Pedder … there be formed a Single Independent Coalition of primarily conservation-oriented candidates”.
The coalition was called the United Tasmania Group, and its first campaign was under way.
The UTG may have had no candidates elected in 1972 – in the four seats they contested, they averaged 4.9% of the vote – and they did not direct preferences (Jones believed neither major party deserved them). The Bethune government was punished for instability, and Labor’s “Electric” Eric Reece was returned in a landslide.
And there was no reprieve for Lake Pedder and it was flooded. A rearguard action by the Whitlam Labor government, led by environment minister Moss Cass, who hoped to reverse the flooding and restore it, proved too little, too late.
But the UTG refused to give up on Pedder, keeping up pressure over the Lake, formally establishing itself as a political party and fleshed out a policy platform which was bursting with new ideas for the future of the state. In 1975 a young doctor from NSW who had moved to Launceston, Bob Brown, inspired and mentored by Jones, ran second to him on the UTG’s Senate ticket.
The following year a handful of mostly UTG members gathered for a strategy meeting at Brown’s house in Liffey Falls, resolving to form the Wilderness Society andcampaign for conservation using non-violent direct action. Brown would lead the Wilderness Society to a spectacular win in the Franklin Dam campaign, after the Hawke Labor government delivered on a promise to save the wild river in the lead-up to the 1983 election.
Brown sat for the next decade as spiritual leader of a growing number of green-minded independents in Tasmania and around the country. He would go on to co-found the Australian Greens in 1992 and then represent the party in the Senate from 1998 until 2012.
The UTG petered out after a disappointing result at the 1977 elections, although it has since been revived.
The party may not have led directly to the formation of the Australian Greens – activist movements for the environment, social justice and peace had to coalesce before that would become possible, and that process would take 20 years. But there is no doubt that the seed of a new green political party was sown in the Hobart town hall in March 1972 when a few hundred people resolved overwhelmingly that no existing party would do enough to confront an environmental crisis, looming even then, or just as importantly save Lake Pedder and its pink sandy beach … which remains intact, submerged, 50 years later.
