“We’ll welcome the people in the leaky boats the same way we welcome the 450,000 immigrants on the plane, except they get a hot shower first.”
The quick breath through the teeth tells me the lay of the land.
“I don’t like it,” says Bob, “They should get out there and work like the rest of us did – Irish, Italian, Vietnamese, whatever.”
“Ah, don’t harden your heart, Bob. These are real people with real troubles. They need help.”
Bob’s son is in Afghanistan fighting. He can’t see why his son should risk his life, over there while the native son gets fed over here.
He thinks we should send fighting age youth home to support the Australian soldiers.
“It’s their fight,” he says.
“Fair enough. If it’s good enough for our boys …”
I let him finish the sentence in his own mind. He sips his JD and nods.
I decide not to argue that we shouldn’t be there in the first place.
My secret mentor, Bob is.
The sad fact of this election campaign is the complete lack of leadership.
We are a real nation with real troubles. We need help.
We do not need outside help, we need to help ourselves. We need to get our act together and take responsibility for our own future.
That requires a leader.
This should not be a competition to identify the best manager of an enormous company that turns over 100 billion a year.
This should be the moment when a nation chooses its leader.
The reason that no-one can make head or tail of the 2010 election campaign, is because the parties are too busy trying to differentiate themselves from each other to recognise that they have no idea what is going on. They have no idea what is going on because they believe that running a campaign, or a political party, is so important that nothing else matters.
Among the clamour of a thousand different voices, they can only respond to the most influential, the best prepared, the ones that will get them the right headline in the morning. So they do.
Leaders do not do that.
Leaders have a clear picture of what is needed and leaders say, this is what we are going to do and I need you, you and you to work out how to do it and you, you and you to help me make it happen.
Australia is looking for a leader.
Australia’s next leader will be Green.
Bob Brown may not be the prime minister after this election, or the one after that. Some time in the next couple of election cycles, a leader will emerge, to show this country the way through the increasingly complex, and devastating storm of financial collapse, food shortages and global migration.
We all know that. That’s why it is so easy to make us afraid of refugees.
“All those poor people over there are going to come here and take all our stuff.”
And we are afraid of that because that is exactly what we did.
That leader will open up the north west of the country, connecting the nation by rail and building huge new trading ports at the point where we face the rest of the world.
Because that leader will be Green that leader will use rail rather than road and will make the cities zero waste and fully renewable. They will be built to last centuries not years. We will learn to smelter steel by concentrating sunlight.
That leader will rebuild the hospitable welcoming spirit of the Australian people, will govern in the spirit of a “fair go” and will guarantee an honest reward for an honest day’s work.
That leader will refuse to sell the resources of this country as raw material so that you and I fritter away the wealth on gadgets and gismos at the cost of making our grandchildren starve.
Rich nations are buying (or stealing) the land and resources of poor nations to protect their people against this difficult future. Our politicians are busy selling our resources off – often to the lowest bidder.
That leader will be Green because only the Greens make policy based on the long term effect of government’s decisions rather than its immediate economic impact.
The Greens say that we should not build new coal fired power stations because the only way to learn how to smelter steel using sunlight is to start developing the tools for converting sunlight to energy, right now.
The Greens say that we should be building rail not roads because it consumes one tenth of the energy to drag along on metal wheels on metal tracks, compared to rubber on macadam.
That leader will be Green because The Greens are the only political party that has been out in the field, with the loggers and the fishers and the farmers arguing about the future.
Other politicians have gone out to make promises. The Greens have gone out there to argue for a better world.
The loggers and the farmers and the fishers and the shooters might be angry, but they are engaged. They are angry because they know that the future is uncertain, that nature can be wild and cruel and that humans need to organise and work together if we are to survive.
These people of the land and sea are angry with The Greens because The Greens want to change a whole lot of the patterns that have been learned over a lifetime.
The people of the land and sea, though, are the first people to realise when the forest is dead, or the fish have run out or that spring that has flowed for a century has dried up.
The people of the land and sea know that we are in trouble and unless we get it right we are going to be fighting with each other.
The people of the land and sea are only beginning to realise that when it the going gets tough, it is The Greens who will be there with them to build a future that is different from the past.
After all, it is The Greens who have been out there in the forests, up there on the smoke stacks, down there in the water – standing up to be counted and saying “something has got to change.”
“So, you going to lead us out of the wilderness, son?”
I confess personality flaws that suggest otherwise.
“What about your man?”
“Bob Brown?”
Bob puts down the JD and nods. One eye finds mine.
“I’ll never vote for you Joe. But if you need back up, yell”
I thank him. Kerry is coming back with the take-away.
Bob indicates I should lean closer. I don’t think he’s going to throw a surprise headlock on me, so I do.
“There’s one thing I’ll say for Bob Brown. He is gay, that’s okay, but he’s the only real man in parliament.”
I laugh and bang the ute top before I say good night.
He’s my secret mentor, Bob is.