Greg Barber

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Greg Barber
Incumbent
Assumed office  2006
Preceded by	None
Constituency	Northern Metropolitan Region
Born	31 August 1966 New Zealand
Nationality	Australian
Political party	Victorian Greens

Greg Barber (born 31 August 1966) is an Australian politician, and Greens member of the Victorian Legislative Council.

Barber obtained a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) and was a corporate campaigner for The Wilderness Society before he was elected to the Yarra City Council in 2002. He was chair of finance of the council, and in 2003 was elected Mayor. He was the first Australian Greens mayor of a local government in the country.

Barber, after narrowly winning pre-selection, won a seat for the Greens in the Northern Metropolitan Region of the Victorian Legislative Council in the 2006 State election.

His time in the Legislative Council was marred by controversy, when a Labor government bill intended to put any development of nuclear reactors in Victoria to a popular referendum was rejected by the Greens. The bill vested a single minister with the power to frame the question and circumstances of any referendum put to the people. The Greens proposed amendments giving that power to parliament, but when this was rejected by a coalition of the ALP and the Nationals, the bill did not pass. This was the first time a bill has been rejected since the Greens gained a shared balance of power in the upper house.

Since this event, Barber and his fellow Greens were criticised by the ALP in the media, who went on to allege that the Greens had entered a secret pact with the Liberals (who also voted against this bill), and published dubious statistics indicating that the Greens vote with the Liberals 68% of the time in the Victorian Parliament^[1]. The Greens claimed that the ALP is misrepresenting their voting record, producing a document detailing how and why they voted in the Victorian Legislative Council^[2].

[edit] External links

• Greg Barber Parliament of Victoria

[edit] References