United Tasmania Group
The United Tasmania Group (UTG) is generally acknowledged as the world's first Green party to contest elections. The party was formed on 23 March 1972, during a meeting of the Lake Pedder Action Committee (LPAC) at the Hobart Town Hall in order to field political candidates in the April 1972 state election. 1970s. UTG contested ten state and federal elections between 1972 and 1977, with the highest vote of 9.9% in the Legislative Council election with Rod Broadby in 1975 (see Appendix 4, UTG Journal Issue No. 6, 2021). The United Tasmania Group's first President  was Dr Richard Jones and it lasted for five years, briefly reforming in 1990 for the federal election. A few of the 1970s candidates, including Bob Brown, went on to form the Tasmanian Greens and then ultimately, at the national level, the Australian Greens. 2010s. In 2 April 2016 following a meeting, former members of the party re-started the group. The United Tasmania Group launched The UTG Journal in 2018. The journal is designed to cover a wide range of topics, including the development of conservation and other issues since that original founding date in April, 1972. Six issues  of The UTG Journal have been published since the re-start of the organisation in 2016. In March 2021 a special 50th year anniversary edition of the UTG Journal, Issue No. 6, was published. This publication is principally a compilation of UTG’s policies from 1972 to 2020 as part of the celebrations of the 50th year of the world’s first ‘Green’ party (the term ‘Green’ had not been invented back then and, when it was it became a term of abuse, especially in Tasmania). UTG is the political party that invented green politics, with major impacts not only  in Tasmania but the rest of Australia and globally. UTG’s policies are reproduced here with historical accuracy, i.e., no content editing and no grammar corrections. It is sometimes said that the Tasmanian Greens evolved out of UTG. However, that is not entirely accurate, if not misleading, for four main reasons. First, very few UTG members went on to participate in the Green Independents (1989), who later became the Tasmanian Greens. The second reason is that UTG’s philosophy is based on ecocentrism - by contrast, the Greens are anthropocentric. The third reason is that UTG’s policies are very different  from those of the present Greens – as is demonstrated across its extensive policies reproduced in UTG Journal No. 6. The fourth reason is UTG’s foundational document called ‘A New Ethic’, which is a set of ethical principles, something much lacking in today’s politics. (see reference to UTG Journal No. 6 below) Histories and analysis. In the mid 1990s Lance Armstrong wrote a history of the politics of Tasmania in the 1990s. In the mid-2000s author Bill Lines also attempted to grapple with the broader scope of politics in Australia relative to greens politics in "Patriots". In the late  2010s Paddy Manning researched and wrote a history of the Greens in Australia, and included the UTG in the first chapter, acknowledging the importance of the group within the larger context. An unpublished Honours Thesis on the party by Pam Walker (University of Tasmania) was written in 1986, and the first chapter in Paddy Manning's book, "Inside the Greens" (2019), is devoted to the history of the party.