Greens Queensland Campaign Launch

Gam and I made a bit of a mad scramble to get to the Greens' Queensland campaign launch today. Gam had clinic, so he caught the train to Ipswich at 7:30am and returned early at around 12pm so we could ride to Ahimsa House at West End for the launch. We'd originally planned on catching the City Cat there, but upon finding we'd have to wait half an hour, Gam said it would be faster to ride there over the William Jolly bridge. And so it would have been if the route from the Coronation St riverside bike path over the bridge and to Ahimsa House hadn't been a veritable obstacle course filled with death traps and what seemed like a total lack of pedestrian crossings and traffic lights. It must have been the least pedestrian and cyclist-friendly part of Brisbane we've ever been to.

Consequently, we were late.



We arrived about 5 minutes before Bob Brown finished his speech and crept around trying to find good spots to take photos from without trampling on or blocking the views of the roughly 50 or so people who attended. The light inside was pretty terrible and after the speech Bob Brown headed outside for a chat to the media.



On his way out he was accosted by several people including Gam, who asked him to pose for a photo with me- Gam said we were nobodies and would he mind having his photo taken with me, and of course Bob Brown said that wasn't at all true and happily posed for a photo. Classic photo position with his hand behind my back, which I realised was all sweaty and gross because we'd ridden there and I had been wearing a backpack. Sorry about that, Bob! He had the good grace not to look disgusted :)



I later told Gam he should have introduced himself as 'the inventor of lolhowards'. Which isn't strictly true given that one blogger did one back in May and Gam's first one was in July, but it still would have sounded good!

Gam snapped about a million pictures while Bob Brown did his speech outside- the idea is that you've got a better chance of getting a good one if you snap loads, and I suppose it's true to some extent. He also tried hard to get a nice photo of the Greens' Queensland senate candidate Larissa Waters- we think she looks a tad manic and scary in her campaign photos and we figured we could do better:





Gam also snapped a nice picture or two of the media:





We also caught up with the Greens' candidate for the federal seat of Brisbane, Elizabeth Guthrie, who we first met by chance at Southbank a couple of weeks ago. In the same vein as the Facebook group 'I wish I lived in Bennelong so I could vote for Maxine' I almost wish we lived in the seat of Brisbane so I could vote for Elizabeth. She seems lovely. Guess I'll have to settle for Dr Evan Jones, our local Greens candidate (Ryan).



All in all an interesting experience. Not particularly exciting (unless you count the near death experiences trying to cross the roads where there were no pedestrian crossings for miles... and we were near a primary school and a park!). There was a nice moment when a bunch of kids doing what looked like a gym class in the school hall across the road started cheering and waving at Bob Brown. Gam wondered if they even knew who he was, but then some of them started yelling 'go the Greens!', so I suppose they did. It was terribly cute and would have been a great photo opportunity if there hadn't been the stupid business of having to have the kids' parents sign release forms before any photographs could be used, so no photos were taken. You can bet your arse John Howard or Kevin Rudd would have sprinted across the road to take advantage of an opportunity like that, traffic not withstanding.