Speaking to RN Breakfast, Mr Brown paraphrased former Prime Minister Paul Keating and said ‘there’s a little shiver... going to run down the spine’ of voters if an Abbott Coalition government is elected on Saturday.

‘The Greens will keep them on the leash, as I think we’re going to see the best result ever for the Greens,’ Mr Brown said.

‘What I won’t be having any part of in the coming years is people saying “oh, we didn’t vote for him” or “we didn’t know he was going to do this”... I’ll be very much on the front foot as saying “yes, you knew”.’ 

With Abbott repeatedly calling the September 7 election a referendum on the Carbon Tax, a Coalition victory would provide a clear mandate for the repeal of the tax. As a key architect of the policy, the former Tasmanian senator says the Greens will fight for the survival of a price on carbon pollution.

‘Voters have to know that if they vote for the Coalition, they are voting for dismantling a very modest effort to hold back the rush of global warming, and that’s a huge threat to our grandkids,’ Mr Brown says. 

‘Not just to their environment and their lifestyle, but [on] current predictions, somewhere between 5 per cent and 20 per cent of their income will be sapped as we try to deal with the damage that global warming [will cause].

‘The Greens are growing in the polls every day as we go towards the election as people start to see what the Abbott government will be like, and that is also a mandate for the Greens to stand firm.’

Polls suggest that there is a chance the Greens will no longer hold the balance of power in the Senate, with the party facing the prospect of losing senate seats to the Coalition in Western Australia and South Australia. Asked if losing the balance of power would call into question the business model of Australia’s ‘blocking’ party, Mr Brown said that a landslide result in both houses would make the role of the Greens more important than ever.

‘If Labor loses it’s going to take them quite a while to get back up on their feet, while the Greens will be in the parliament the first day it sits, on the front foot,' he said.

Mr Brown also called Abbott’s pledge to revoke the World Heritage Listing granted to 170,000 hectares of Tasmanian tall Eucalypt forests a ‘u-turn on Australia’s proud global efforts.’

‘Here we have in this wealthy country these huge and magnificent forests...and we’ve got a prospective Prime Minister, as of next Sunday, saying I’m going to remove world heritage, to allow industrialised logging and woodchipping back in there to continue the job of destruction,’ Mr Brown says.

‘I think most prospective voters will be appalled to know that that’s his stated intention. 

‘This is a maverick attitude to take us back to before the Whitlam Government...as far as the approach to Australia’s terrific natural and cultural heritage is concerned.’

The Greens will also stand opposed to Coalition plans to return environmental planning oversight to the states. His party is calling for an expansion of federal responsibility to cover all environmental issues. 

‘The Greens have moved, repeatedly, to put the triggers into environmental law that would empower our federal government to protect things of such national value. But here we have Tony Abbott saying he’ll get rid of what protection powers the federal government essentially has now and hand them back to the states.'

‘Instead of changing the way we’re going, Tony Abbott is saying, “let’s put our foot on the development accelerator” and remove the sensible, if very much limited, environmental review that we do before we allow the expansion of our impact on the country.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/greens-will-have-carbon-tax-mandate-brown/4933640