‘Big mistake to expel me’: campaigner gun and party co-founder Drew Hutton blasts the Greens
Drew Hutton has always stood up for free speech; now he’s taking on the party he co-founded for trying to shut him down.
At 78, Drew Hutton has a new lease on life, a mission that has reignited the fire in his lean belly. His purpose? To right the great wrong that, he says, was done to him by the political party he co-founded, the Australian Greens.
This is bad news for new leader Larissa Waters, who is picking up the pieces after a disastrous federal election result in May cost the Greens three house seats including that of her predecessor, Adam Bandt.
As Hutton ably demonstrated across a half-century of political activism, he is not to be underestimated. The old boy is a relentless adversary who took on Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s police state in Queensland in the 1970s and 80s, and laid the foundations of the Greens’ electoral success in the 90s and noughties with his friend Bob Brown.
In the second decade of the century he became the face of Lock the Gate, a national movement to shut natural gas and coal miners out of prime farmlands. No wonder Brown hails him as a hero.
The trouble for the party they set up together in 1992 is that Hutton is now free to oppose it openly, after three years of shadow-boxing ended this week with the confirmation that his life membership had been revoked for questioning the Greens’ handling of transgender rights.
In expelling him, his home branch lifted the lid on long-simmering tensions over how the party is organised at both the state level and federally, its direction, priorities and who exactly calls the shots.
Hutton’s devastating charge is that the Greens have been hijacked by an intolerant “transgender and queer cult” – his terminology – that will lead them to electoral doom.
He tells Inquirer: “When people find out just what’s going on in this party they won’t vote for them. They’ll look for a sane alternative. And that’s a terrible shame because there is a real gap in politics there.
“Neither of the major parties have got any answers on the big environmental issues of the day, and even some of the social issues of the day. So there is a place for that sort of political force.
“But while this sort of doctrinaire, authoritarian faction is moving in on the Greens and turning it into a cult, then they’ll be shunned. Ordinary voters simply can’t relate to them or the gender issues they’re obsessed with.”
Make no mistake: this is more than a dispute over policy or the rough handling of one man who refused to toe the line. Hutton’s expulsion has exposed deep fissures in the Greens that transcend politics and personalities.
The divide is generational, pitting old-school “deep” greens such as Hutton, steeped in environmental activism, against the new generation of urban-centric social campaigners who see trans rights as core party business.
He professes to have been contacted by 30 other former members booted for voicing reservations about the pro-trans platform, and many others who complained about being hounded into quitting. Most were women aged over 50.
The bitterly argued dispute penetrates to values. The Greens, after all, pride themselves on their inclusivity; Brown was the first member of any Australian parliament to identify as being gay.
Yet in Hutton’s telling, his own treatment by the party was deeply unjust. He had not been actively engaged in its affairs for more than a decade when he posted on his private Facebook page, in June 2022, decrying “authoritarian and anti-democratic” disciplinary action taken against green feminists for questioning trans “rights” such as access to female-only spaces in change rooms and toilets.
Importantly, he did not take a side, saying in part: “I believe in full human rights for trans people at the same time as supporting the right of women to be safe from patriarchal oppression.”
But in follow-up posts he referenced the sacking in Victoria of state convener Linda Gale, marched for allegedly promulgating transphobic views, and the expulsion from the NSW Greens of human rights lawyer Anna Kerr on similar grounds. Both vehemently deny being anti-trans.
So does Hutton. The issue for him is free speech, not the Greens’ strongly pro-trans sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex platform. (Among other things, it holds that trans and gender-diverse young people should have the freedom and support to affirm their gender. Any “medical intervention” should be guided by the young person concerned.)
His transgression, so to speak, was failing to expunge from the Facebook thread comments by others that were held to be offensive and in breach of party rules. In fairness to his accusers, Hutton was given the opportunity to hit delete; he refused on the basis that people had a right to sensibly speak their minds.
He has form defending free speech. Back in the day, when public protests and demonstrations were banned in Queensland unless the police assented, which they rarely did, Hutton would chain himself to a tree in downtown Brisbane’s Queen Street Mall to rail against Joh’s antics to the Friday night shoppers and revellers. He was arrested more than 20 times.
The son of a country butcher, he was the first in his family to attend university. His passion was competitive running. Young Drew collected a state title in the 800m and posted handy times in the hurdles, almost earning him a place on the 1968 Olympics team. Standing 190.5cm (a lanky six feet three), fit as a flea and only 3kg over his race weight, he still can punch out a half-marathon. Naturally, he became an anarchist.
“Actually, I wasn’t a very good anarchist,” he says, laughing. “I had a job and believed in things like law and order.” He worked as a high school teacher and got into teaching student teachers, his entree to academia.
Despite all of Hutton’s extra-curricular efforts, Bjelke-Petersen kept winning elections.
By the early 80s Hutton had lifted his sights to Europe, where the German Greens were going places with their four-pronged agenda of ecological sustainability, social justice, democracy and nonviolence. In 1984, he established the Brisbane Greens and stood for mayor. He got 4 per cent of the vote – not bad from a running start, he thought.
Brown, an independent MP in the Tasmanian parliament, had come to national prominence through the campaign to block the Franklin River dam. Hutton hit it off with him immediately, forging their enduring friendship. In due course they started talking about bringing the Greens brand to national politics.
The Tasmanian and Queensland Greens, founded in 1991 by Hutton, would bookend the party under Brown’s parliamentary leadership. In Brisbane, the troublesome Trotskyists, ideological slaves to permanent revolution, tried to infiltrate the new set-up but were rebuffed by Hutton, who knew all too well what they were up to.
He and Brown wanted a party organisation that was strong at the grassroots and nationally but relatively weak at the state level. They didn’t get it.
Each division emerged with a distinctive character.
NSW, for example, was dominated by former members of the Stalinist Socialist Party of Australia including future senator Lee Rhiannon, who would lose her top spot on the ticket in 2017 to Mehreen Faruqi amid fierce infighting. True to form, the parochial West Australians refused initially to affiliate. But gradually the Australian Greens made progress.
The breakthrough came in 1996 when Brown was elected to the Senate. In 2004, he was joined by anti-pulp mill campaigner Christine Milne after the Greens’ vote jumped two points to 7.2 per cent nationally, delivering four spots in the red chamber.
Hutton went as close as he would ever go to getting the cigar but was pipped for the last quota in Queensland by an outback accountant named Barnaby Joyce, running for the National Party.
As the decade closed, Hutton decided he had done all he could with the Greens. One of his last efforts was to help Waters secure her Senate preselection and election in 2010, joining a nine-strong team of Greens under Brown.
“I’d just come to the end of my useful life in the party,” Hutton remembers. “I didn’t leave, I just stopped being active.”
His wife, Libby Connors, like him an activist and academic, was looking into the encroachment of coal and coal seam gas mining on some of the nation’s richest agricultural lands on the Darling Downs, west of Brisbane. She arranged for Hutton to sit down with some of the aggrieved farmers. Could anything be done to stop the miners barging onto their land?
Listening to their stories fired him up. Hutton pored through the state legislation, focusing on a requirement for the companies to reach an access and compensation agreement with the landholder. Don’t sign, he told the farmers. Shut the gate.
Hutton thought that sounded like a good name until it was pointed out to him that any self-respecting producer routinely shut the paddock gate. Otherwise, the stock would bolt, mate. No, they should Lock the Gate. The movement took off, with Lock the Gate franchises popping up across the country, from northern NSW to the Northern Territory, in Victoria, even Tasmania.
Hutton travelled relentlessly, advising conservative country folk on how to take direct action, insistent that they do so peacefully.
By 2017, approaching his 70th birthday, he was exhausted and sick. Libby told him he had done enough.
Which brings us up to date. “I was very happily retired until the Queensland Greens, the party I founded, the party in which I wanted to live out my days as an interested but non-active member, came after me,” he says.
“That was a big mistake on their part. In expelling me, they’ve taken action against someone who knows how to campaign. I campaigned for free speech against Bjelke-Petersen and I will campaign for free speech against them. I’m old, but I am not finished by any means.”
Hutton is seeking legal advice on the validity of his expulsion and, ominously for the Greens, says he will explore other “political options”. Teals bankroller Simon Holmes a Court might be getting a call.
Waters, keen to find her feet this week as the new parliament convened, with Labor cock-a-hoop at its commanding majority in the house and improved position in the Senate, needs the noisy distraction like a hole in the head.
Hutton is gunning for her, saying the Greens are on the road to ruin taken by the party they replaced as an alternative bloc in parliament, the defunct Australian Democrats. Leadership is required to stand up to the “cult” behind his expulsion.
“Larissa needs to lead, like Bob and Christine did,” Hutton says.
“She’s the leader of the party, a Queenslander, and she needs to show character and courage. Instead she simply went to ground while all this was happening. Northing was heard from her.”
Hutton says Waters should intervene to stop the purge of members who cross the pro-trans lobby, provided the positions they take are reasonable and respectfully put. He also wants her to review the party’s policymaking and disciplinary processes, preferably through an open inquiry, “to see if they are consistent with our principles of democracy and free speech”.
So far, she’s not budging. Hitting back at Hutton, Waters said in a statement to The Australian: “Greens members have been working hard to resolve this matter through the party’s governance processes, and to ensure that the party’s important work on environmental, climate, economic and social justice doesn’t stop because of one man’s focus on how other people identify.”
It didn’t help when Waters admitted on the ABC’s 7.30 program on Tuesday that she hadn’t read the complaint against Hutton, triggering another blast from the old stager.
Gale, the sacked Victorian Greens convener, says drolly: “Larissa should have been across the issue more than she apparently was.”
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