Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Janet, you are just the most terrific human being. You are optimistic and indefatigable, you are an extremely caring and loving person and you're an authentic human being. In one of the greatest compliments I can give to anyone, you are a genuine life enthusiast. Enthusiasm for life takes a little bit of courage because you're not just opening yourself up to the good things. To be an enthusiast, you're opening yourself up to some of the blows that life can land on you and sometimes those blows land really deeply in your heart and in your gut because you are so open and enthusiastic. Despite a couple of blows along the way, you have remained a genuine enthusiast and you have my upmost regard for that.

Others have spoken about some of the things you've been involved in. I want to mention forests, and what an honour it is to take that portfolio on after your massive efforts—with some success. I know you will agree the fight is not over and it will go on, and yours are really big hiking boots I now have to try to fill, but I take it on because I genuinely share your abiding love of nature which has shone through in what you do because you're a force of nature as well as someone who loves nature.

We have heard that you are a founding member of the Victorian Greens. All of us in the Greens stand on the shoulders of giants, founders, elders and legends of our party, and you take your place in that pantheon for us. I know my colleagues will forgive me a slight breach of our party room rules, so I'm going to reveal something that happened this morning, and it was about Max Chandler-Mather, who is here with some of his House of Representatives Greens colleagues. It turns out that Max was born in the year that Janet helped found the Victorian Greens. That is how far we have come as a movement and how far, I have no doubt, we are going to continue to go.

Janet's love of consensus decision-making has made some of the more impatient in our party room—I'll put my hand up here—gnash our teeth from time to time but it comes from an abiding love of that process. Janet, I know you genuinely believe it, as we all do, that a decision made by consensus is one that will stick. You have repeated that to us.

Janet, I've got to go to Selection of Bills Committee but we are all far, far better people for having spent time with you. We trust there will be plenty more of that to come. I will see you in the streets, and it wouldn't surprise me if I see you on the barricades in the forest one day. Thank you very much, Janet.