Drew Hutton had assumed he would live out his life a card-carrying Green. The 78-year-old retiree turned up to local branch meetings, staked party corflutes into the lawn of his home on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and handed out how-to-vote cards long after stepping down from active duty in the party.
Given Hutton had been awarded life membership and his friend – and the Green’s first national leader – Bob Brown had lauded him a “towering figure in Australian environmental and social politics” who, “more than anybody” (including Brown himself) was “responsible for the formation of the Australian Greens”, it must have seemed a safe bet.
But, on 20 July, Hutton will stand before the Queensland Greens state council and plead his case that they reverse a decision by its Constitution and Arbitration Committee (CAC) to expel him.
The former lecturer of politics and history will draw on symbolically powerful support. Both Brown and the party’s second national leader, Christine Milne, oppose Hutton’s expulsion and have written to advocate that his membership be restored.
“The important thing isn’t me,” Hutton tell Guardian Australia. “The important thing is the Greens.
“Are they going to be a dogmatic, authoritarian party that exerts all this top-down control over members? Or is it going to be the sort of party that people like Bob Brown and myself originally created with a historic mission to try to push the world to a more sustainable footing?”
The official story of the termination of Hutton’s membership begins on 21 June 2022 at exactly 3:50pm. It was a month to the day after a federal election which would prove a high-water mark for the Greens in Queensland.
Then Victorian parliamentary leader, Samantha Ratnam, had just removed Linda Gale from her recently elected position as state convenor because of an internal discussion paper Gale co-authored three years earlier. The paper aimed to prevent what it deemed was a move to “shut down any debate” on a “critical issue in feminism and women’s rights today”: the definition of a woman. Ratnam labelled the paper “transphobic”.
In New South Wales, feminist lawyer Anna Kerr had her party membership terminated for disrupting Greens actions and discussion groups with what was deemed transphobic views, including being quoted in the media as being “extremely disturbed” by a NSW Greens push to amend legislation to use the term “pregnant person” instead of “pregnant woman”.
On his personal Facebook page, Hutton labelled these moves “authoritarian and antidemocratic”.
“I believe in full human rights for trans people at the same time as supporting the right of women to be safe from patriarchal oppression,” he wrote.
“I am also prepared to say these things publicly. Unfortunately, in the Greens at present that would seem to make me a ‘transphobe’ … .”
Two days later, Hutton wrote what he said would be a “final statement” on the post before which he would close comments raging in the thread below, some of which he acknowledged had been “hurtful and disrespectful”.
A year later, after a complaint lodged against him, the CAC suspended Hutton’s membership until such time as he deleted a post criticising the Greens and removed comments made by others which it deemed transphobic.
The committee rejected the allegation Hutton himself had demeaned trans women, but found he had provided a platform for others to do so.
Hutton refused to comply, citing free speech – an issue for which he had once chained himself to a tree in Queens Street Mall and for which he had been thrown into jail by Bjelke-Petersen’s corrupt police force many times as part of a broader civil disobedience campaign which was, eventually, successful in the form of the landmark 1992 Peaceful Assembly Act.
A near two-year standoff ensued in which Hutton abided by the CAC’s directive he remain silent.
But the deadlock broke open on 15 March 2025 when the Saturday Paper ran the Hutton saga.
Hutton says his is not an isolated case, and claims he knows of more than 40 people who have been expelled or “forced out” of the Greens after voicing their position on gender.
Most of those women don’t want to be identified, Hutton says, for fear of backlash. One who does though, and who fits all the aforementioned categories, is Cheryl Hercus.
In 2016, Hercus ran for the Greens in the federal seat of Goldstein in Melbourne. The retired feminist lecturer and author let her party membership lapse in 2019 after having to defend herself against a complaint that alleged she had “proven intransigent” and that her “promoting harmful transphobic views, articles and beliefs” online reflected her “deeply held beliefs”.
“I could probably add another half a dozen to that that Drew doesn’t know about,” Hercus says. “Women who were involved in the Greens a very long time who’ve just resigned in disgust or disappeared”.
By taking to the soapbox, Hutton succeeded in forcing the hand of CAC which “terminated” his membership “effective immediately” on 24 June. This opened the door for Hutton’s long-sought appeal, denied him while his membership languished indefinitely suspended.