TASMANIAN Greens' glory days are ahead of them, says former Australian Greens leader Bob Brown, in spite of the Greens' thrashing at the state election last month.
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Speaking after his retirement this week as chairman of anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd, Dr Brown said the Greens would ``bounce back'' after losing two seats in the House of Assembly.
Dr Brown said he had seen a similar swing after the Labor-Green accord of the late 1980s, following which Ray Groom's Liberal party won a majority, although the Greens had retained their five seats.
``The Greens are in a much stronger position now (than when it was just Peg Putt in the House of Assembly in 1998), and they will bounce back very strongly,'' he said.
``No one else is going to stand up for Tasmania's forests like the Tarkine, or the marine environment.
``They will be the real opposition.''
Being stripped of official political party status would not deter the Tasmanian Greens, Dr Brown said.
``I can remember when I only had a telephone (as an MHA) and no staff,'' he said.
``You make do, and they will do a good job of it.
``I'm pleased that Kim Booth will be working on in Bass.''
The Hodgman and Abbott governments should both be ``asking themselves if they want to go back'' to the so-called forest wars, he said, if they rescinded the World Heritage Area listing of 74,000 hectares of Tasmanian wilderness.
He said Monday's international legal ruling against Japan's ``scientific'' whaling program in the Antarctic was a high point on which to end his career with Sea Shepherd, two days before he officially stood down at a board meeting on Wednesday.
``It's extremely important because there's more than 1000 whales swimming towards Australia and Tasmania at the moment because of those operations, which makes me very, very happy,'' he said.
Dr Brown, who turns 70 in December, looks set to finally embrace his retirement, nearly two years after leaving the Senate in June 2012.
He has begun a three-month trip around Australia with partner Paul Thomas, visiting properties bought by Bush Heritage, which Dr Brown founded in 1991 and of which he remains patron.
Following his travels, Dr Brown hopes to return to Tasmania, where he is based at Cygnet, and e will visit Launceston in August for the release of his book of anecdotes.
``The very first story is about when I was a young doctor in Launceston, at Mowbray, so the book certainly has a regional flavour,'' he said.