BOB Brown yesterday hammered the point that the two major parties did not want him at last night's leaders' debate.
"Two's company, three's a crowd," said the Tasmanian senator, who has been leader of the Australian Greens since 2005.
"Well I'm happy to be here with the crowd."
That crowd - the voters of Australia - have steadily warmed to Senator Brown and his party. Today, depending on which poll you read, the Greens have between 10 and 15 per cent support across the country.
According to what Senator Brown told the faithful at a Queensland party launch on Mt Coot-tha yesterday, this level of support means they have supplanted the National Party as Australia's third party, though the Nats would contest this west of the Dividing Range.
The question in 2010 is whether Queenslanders are ready to vote for a Greens senator for the first time, as the two major parties argue over the pace of reform in environment, climate and population, issues which have been on the Greens agenda for decades.
Senator Brown first entered the public arena as a member of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society and is a survivor of the protest movement that stopped the dam on the state's Franklin River in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was one of 1500 people arrested and spent 19 days in jail.
He entered state politics in 1983 and by 1989 there were five Greens in Tasmania's House of Assembly.
He had an unsuccessful tilt at a federal House of Representatives seat in 1993, before winning his Senate spot in 1996. Ever since, Senator Brown has become a fixture in Australian politics.
Yesterday he talked up the Greens' role in the Senate, negotiating improvements to Labor's stimulus package and helping gain an extra $30 a week for pensioners.
Senator Brown said a shift in Australian politics would come on August 21.
"This is a great moment in Australian political history," he said.
"Queensland has always been part of the leadership in the great changes that have occurred in Australian political history.
"And Queensland will be part of that change in this coming election."
The change he refers to is the very strong likelihood that Queensland voters will elect their first Greens Senator in environmental lawyer Larissa Waters, as part of an Australia-wide shift predicted to give the Greens the balance of power in the upper house.
Ms Waters narrowly missed the sixth Queensland Senate berth in 2007. She lives in the Brisbane suburb of Bardon, and at yesterday's launch demonstrated her hard and soft sides.
The soft where she talked up the Greens' links with community and local areas.
"As I go around the state, there are so many issues facing our communities. Local issues like wanting to put a dump next to a national park on a creek that flows into the Great Barrier Reef.
"In Mackay, where you can't get a bus before 7.30am, and even then there is only one on the hour after that.
"There's local issues like the contamination of groundwater that we have seen in Kingaroy from experimental technology, underground coal gasification." (Tests by Queensland's Department of Environment and Resource Management yesterday showed the bore holes had low levels of cancer-causing chemicals, well within drinking standards.)
And the hard, where she attacks vested interests in big politics.
"We have the plans to protect the Reef, we just need the people's support," Ms Waters argued.
"It is about time that it is people and the planet that are running this place and not vested interests and political donors."
The would-be senator firmly believes the market is ready to take the chance on a carbon price and renewable technology and the two major parties are getting in the road.
"It would kickstart our renewable sector. It would give the 10,000 jobs in Queensland in clean energy and protects those 63,000 jobs that rely on a healthy Great Barrier Reef," she said.
At this stage the Greens make no mention of the risks to jobs in high-emission industries that would be affected.
Earlier yesterday morning she made the point that the Opposition and the ALP were not outlining the facts in the population and immigration debate.
"We are hearing the slogan, but we are not hearing the details of the environmental and infrastructure constraints on our regions, or the fact that there are so few refugee and asylum seekers needing our help.
"We are hearing the dog whistling, but we are not hearing the facts and we are not hearing the compassion."
Truth in politics was a point also mentioned frequently by Senator Brown during yesterday's launch.
Soon it will fall to the voters to decide whether the Greens can take over the Democrats' job of "keeping the bastards honest" in the Senate.
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