Do we like them?

Do we like Peter Garrett?

Our score: 8 out of 10. A lifetime on the right side of LGBTQ+ rights, First Nations issues and the planet, held back by one deadly policy failure on his watch.

Garrett is the towering bloke who fronted Midnight Oil, and the band's songs were never just about the tune. After touring remote Aboriginal communities the band wrote 'Beds Are Burning', and he went on to become president of the Australian Conservation Foundation in 1989, when he worked with farmers to get the Hawke government behind Landcare. That is a rare thing: a rock star whose politics were the real deal before they were a career.

Then he went into parliament. He was elected as a Labor MP for Kingsford Smith and served as a minister, and the record shows he never once voted against his own party across more than a thousand divisions. That loyalty has a price: the party line sometimes sat awkwardly with the activist who had spent years as a critic of it.

The harm check comes up clean. On marriage equality, he told ABC TV in 2011 that he saw no major obstacles, and in 2006 he said “I don't have a problem with it.” The voting record backs the words: he consistently voted for same-sex marriage, extending entitlements to same-sex couples, a carbon price and the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. On First Nations issues, he has described a long history of working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and has argued for more Indigenous voices in parliament.

The stain is the home insulation scheme. Four installers died during the Rudd government program, and a royal commission looked into what advice ministers had. Garrett told it he accepted “ultimate responsibility” while saying others shared the blame, and one victim's brother said one death should have been enough to halt the scheme. He said he acted on the advice he had and pushed harder as the deaths mounted. Where you land depends on whether you see a minister who owned the failure or one who should have acted sooner.

There are smaller dings. He withdrew a 2015 claim that a Clubs NSW representative handed him an envelope of cash, saying it was a cheque, and in his memoir he called Kevin Rudd a megalomaniac and later said backing Rudd was his biggest mistake in parliament. In March 2025 he told a Perth Festival crowd to pretend they were dancing on Gina Rinehart's grave. WA Premier Roger Cook called it “completely inappropriate”, and a Rinehart spokesperson called him “an attention-seeking activist”. No response from Garrett was reported. It's cheeky rather than harmful, but not exactly nice.

The recent stuff is on brand. In April 2026 he took over as chair of Landcare Australia, a movement of thousands of volunteer groups he first helped back in 1989, and in June he was named to lead a crowd-funded people's inquiry into AUKUS. Supporters see a long-overdue look at a huge spending decision; critics will see an ex-politician running a campaign inquiry without a government mandate. It's in character either way.