WA Greens MLC Brad Pettitt (Image: WA Greens)

The Honourable Dr Brad Pettitt MLC is the last Green left in the WA Parliament, and even then he only just scraped in to the upper house in the March 2021 election.

Why the virtual wipeout of the Greens? “The State election was a COVID election,” is Pettitt’s simple explanation.

And he is concerned that a similar result will be replicated at the federal election: “The danger for the Greens is that we will see a repeat of what happened in WA.”

However, the 49-year-old, Tesla-driving former dean of sustainability at Murdoch University and former long-term mayor of Fremantle is confident he can work with government members and members of other parties on climate change and other issues.

And that even includes the National Party, the official opposition party, which Pettitt describes as very different from the federal National Party: “The WA Nationals are much more inclined to see the opportunities around climate change.”

With “WA the only state where emissions are going up”, he says, the need for cross-party and urgent action is obvious and paramount: “Just as the science around COVID is very clear, a science-led approach to climate is also essential.”

Pettitt sees WA Labor holding government through the next two terms: “The WA Labor government has a great opportunity to make some of the big decisions that have to be made, and I put climate front and centre in that space. The decisions Labor makes in 2021 they will have to sell in 2029.”

The recent release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report not only provides the Greens with vindication of their consistent position on climate change but also will embolden Pettitt, National Greens leader Adam Bandt and the rest of the Greens to promote a radically different approach to climate change in Australia.

Selling the link between climate change and the economy as a mainstream issue will be the challenge, Pettitt says, reiterating what he said in his maiden speech to Parliament: “A sustainable future … has a triple bottom-line approach: economic, social and environmental.”

And that also means linking climate and jobs. “One of the things the major parties do much better than the Greens is jobs,” Pettitt said.

Agreeing with Kevin Rudd’s statement that “climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation”, Pettitt also said in his maiden speech: “There is perhaps no bigger or more substantive issue facing us right now than climate change.”

Addressing this task, he says, will be made easier with Labor in government: “Morrison will lose the next election with his inconsistent handling of COVID and lack of leadership on climate change.”

Reminded of former Labor finance minister Peter Walsh’s quip that on economic policy the Greens were like “fairies at the bottom of the garden”, Pettitt nonetheless insists that by the following federal election in four years’ time, COVID will be done and climate will be the focus.