How Bob Brown mulled backing Tony Abbott and copped attitude from Julia Gillard

FORMER Greens leader Bob Brown considered throwing his support to Tony Abbott to become prime minister after the 2010 election.

FORMER Greens leader Bob Brown considered throwing his support to Tony Abbott to become prime minister after the 2010 election, a suggestion Mr Abbott took seriously, telling Dr Brown “anything” was up for negotiation, except a carbon price.

Dr Brown’s memoir, obtained by The Weekend Australian ahead of its release this week, also reveals he previously had a sour relationship with Julia Gillard that could have damaged her chances of forming a minority government.

In Optimism: Reflections on a Life of Action (Hardie Grant), Dr Brown reveals his annoyance that Ms Gillard had accused him of being a political opportunist. Passing him in Parliament House in 2008, Ms Gillard made a snide remark, asking what he was doing “to damage the Labor Party today”, but after the Greens supported a minority Labor government, “We got along very well,” he writes.

Dr Brown, who resigned from the Senate in 2012, writes he wanted to give Mr Abbott the opportunity to present an offer that could secure Greens’ support for a minority Coalition government, even though Melbourne MP Adam Bandt said he would not support an Abbott government.

“A savvy Coalition leader could offer social and environmental outcomes that would not only make backing Labor difficult but would create long-term angst for the Greens if we turned them down,” he writes.

“This was (Mr Abbott’s) chance and I was determined he should exercise it.”

The two never hit it off. Although Mr Abbott “said that he would talk about anything except a carbon tax in order to get government,” Dr Brown writes, he “had no offer and was neither seriously engaged nor up to being seriously engaged”.

Dr Brown includes a memo documenting a meeting with Mr Abbott in February 2010, shortly after he became opposition leader. Dr Brown told Mr Abbott the Greens “are not pro-Labor or anti-Liberal” and could support a ­Coalition government if the Greens held the balance of power.

He also writes about how Ms Gillard wanted to enlist former prime minister John Howard to campaign for indigenous recognition. She would also approach former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull about joining the ­government-crossbench climate change committee. He writes that Mr Abbott thought Andrew ­Wilkie could be wooed to support a Coalition government.

Dr Brown chronicles his life ­defined by environmental campaigns, working as a doctor and as a state and federal politician, and his homosexuality. He writes about his values and policy ideas, including his goal of establishing “a global parliament”.

“The denial of the unsustain­ability of our current gluttony is a perverse byproduct of our need to deny our mortality,” he writes.

“Zest for life cannot flower if one’s mind concentrates on the ­ineluctable reality of personal ­extinguishment.”

He writes about the night he was on duty at London’s St Mary Abbots Hospital in 1970, when Jimi Hendrix was wheeled in on a trolley. He had choked on vomit after consuming “a cocktail of red wine and sleeping pills”.