Page 927 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 May 2020
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Sadly, as Mr Coe noted, in 1986 a terrible event occurred when her son, Brandon, drowned in an eddy in the river at Casuarina Sands. But people who have met Deb would agree that she was a very tough and persevering woman. Although his death clearly had a major impact on her life, she found a way to keep going and to continue to put her energy into sustainability.
She undertook a master’s in human ecology at ANU, focusing on a political and ecological analysis of urban development in the ACT. Human ecology is the study of humans and their myriad impacts and interactions with the planet, a holistic way of bringing all of the sciences together to better understand how we can become more sustainable. Deb became a tutor in human ecology, and through this became a mentor and an inspiration to many aspiring scientists and environmentalists at ANU in the early to mid 1990s.
Deb was involved in a number of campaigns and causes, including women’s reproductive rights, foreign aid, environmental issues and forest protection. This is why the Greens were her natural home. She was not a single-issue campaigner but a well-rounded and holistic thinker with a complex but coherent vision of a policy ideal based on resources, the ecology, social care, feminism and class. She was a deep thinker and admired for her intellect and policy contributions. The Greens are certainly the only political party that she, with her passion for collaboration and participative governance, could ever have joined and helped to grow.
In 1998, while running for the Senate for the ACT, she was the Australian Greens spokesperson on population issues and worked to revise our national policy to remove our immigration limits to better move to a sustainable world while being compassionate. Her PhD looked at the role of community movements in the framing of international United Nations population programs. Through this work she became very interested in the globalisation movement. This was a time when the anti-globalisation movement was growing worldwide, sparked initially by the Seattle WTO protests, focused on free trade agreements but campaigning on the impacts on workers, the environment, women and indigenous people.
Deb established a local WTOWatch activist group here in the ACT and also singlehandedly created a national following of people to receive her regular summary of all the evolving news, events and policy development around the world relating to globalisation issues. This campaign, leading to the S11 protest in Melbourne in September 2000, was one of the earliest campaigns that truly united the usually disparate unions and environment organisations and myriad other campaign groups.
Deb was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 2004. It was the year after the 2003 fires in Canberra and during a long period of drought. During the period, she worked hard to raise issues of water efficiency and climate change; defend the Greens, who were being blamed for the fires at the time; and campaign on issues of sustainability. I note that there was even a debate at the time about whether the word “sustainability” was a real term.
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