By Patrick Hannaford
Excerpt:
Australian Greens co-founder Drew Hutton has revealed what drove him to finally quit the party he helped set up more than 30 years ago.
Mr Hutton quit the Greens on Wednesday, telling the party leadership that while he still believed in “Green politics”, he had been left with no choice but to resign his membership.
“I’m very sad about this as the Greens was a major part of my life’s work. However, their support for gender extremism, their rejection of freedom of speech and their refusal to see the world in any other terms than the narrow class bubble they are in meant I had little choice,” he wrote in a post on Facebook.
The 79-year-old environmental activist played a crucial role in the formation of the Queensland Greens before co-founding the Australian Greens with former leader Bob Brown in the early 1990s.
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Asked by Sky News host Caleb Bond why he had quit the party just three months after his membership was reinstated, Mr Hutton said he had hoped to change the party’s positions on a few core issues but they had froze him out.
“I was hoping that I might be able to change their minds about… the lack of free speech, the extremism on gender issues, and their intolerance of people who don’t share their narrow cultural concerns,” Mr Hutton said.
“I think they’re quite self-evidently problems that the Greens have. they don’t see it that way, they think that they don’t really deserve any sort of self-analysis or criticism.
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“I mean, basically they just froze me out. They refused to pick up the phone to me, they refused to answer emails, and nobody much in the party was prepared to come out and take them on, even when they agreed with me.
“So I thought, I’m wasting my time here. I may as well go and support good community independence, people who are good on the environment, who knew the difference between a man and a woman, and believed in free speech. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
