Just how special a human being Bob Brown is may be seen from reading the full text of his third Green Oration, given to the party faithful days before he announced his retirement from parliamentary politics.
Mocked and pilloried by lesser minds, it was a visionary speech, freshened by a sly sense of humour and irony. It set out his irrepressible optimism and sense of our common humanity across this fragile planet, and of the duties of compassion and mutual respect we owe to one another as shared stewards of our wondrous earthly home.
This is the Greens moral vision. It is the same grand vision Tony Judt came to in the later years of his rich scholarly life: that we all share the same universal rights as human beings, not as rich or poor or as citizens of one powerful country or another.
Vale, Bob — enjoy your well-earned retirement and continue to inspire us with your wisdom and humanity.
Christine Milne inherits the Greens' ecological and humanist vision. In every sense, she is Brown's rightful heir. The next promising generation of Greens leaders will be nurtured and grow under her leadership. There are many of them: the party continues to grow and attract real talents.
Milne shares Brown's Tasmanian roots and wilderness inspiration. They manned the forest barricades together. At 59, she has fire in her belly and years of productive politics to come.
An interesting paradox — a feet-on-the-ground Tasmanian country woman, a farmer's daughter, who became a fervent Green, now sees her prime task as being to build coalitions of trust and policy cooperation between the Greens and the threatened rural and small business communities of Australia, against the power of plutocracy.
There will be interesting new coalitions of interest taking shape under Milne: she will network with people who might otherwise go to Barnaby Joyce or Bob Katter, keeping a decent Australian populist vision alive.
Her apparent ordinariness will be an asset. Don't be fooled by this, for she has a keen mind and a firm grasp of the Australian political style.
Enemies of the Greens are painting her as a rigid eco-ideologue, a cold fanatic who cannot compromise and do pragmatic deals as they say Brown could do so well. Such a critique falsely paints Brown in retrospect as an avuncular teddy-bear politician who knew how to compromise better and more gracefully than Milne will.
Don't believe it. Brown ruthlessly pulled the rug from under Kevin Rudd's failed climate policy, precipitating Rudd's loss of credibility and fall from power. Brown and Milne share the same steel and political acumen.
I know from personal experience Milne's grass-roots humanity, her attention to human detail in her concern, for example, for the safety of life at sea of asylum seekers, and her refusal to be fobbed off with lies and half-truths whenever things have gone bad.
She has the same human concern for the threatened security of people in country towns and along our inland rivers. As I see her, her feet are firmly on the ground of Australian country decency and hospitality, with a sense of human scale and of our possibilities to be a better nation than we are now.
The Greens are lucky to have her ready now to inherit Brown's mantle.
Can she command from the Greens party faithful the same fervent loyalties Brown attracted? This is the wrong question, proceeding from a hostile misreading of what kind of party the Greens are. They are hard-nosed pragmatists, but united by a shared ideological vision of moving towards more responsible stewardship of the nation and of the planet. They are not woolly-heads, easily swayed by personality-cult leadership politics.
The Greens' present fortuitous window of direct policy-influencing power as junior partner in a minority-led coalition government may soon be passing. Or it may not. The electors will decide at the next election. In either event, I believe the Greens under Milne will continue to thrive as a vigorous creative force in Australian politics, pushing and prodding the major parties to come up with better policies in the national public interest.
The Greens are the party that says we Australians are capable of a better vision for the future than either major party is currently offering us. They will continue to throw sand in the gears of the competing plutocratic vision, of Australia as a feckless and profit-hungry world quarry, indifferent to dying country towns and the erosion of real jobs and working communities everywhere.
Tony Kevin is the author of Crunch Time, a book exploring Australia's inadequate policy responses to the climate change crisis.