Gerry Bates was a tutor at the University of Birmingham, UK, and also a lecturer and senior lecturer at Birmingham Polytechnic and the University of Tasmania.Gerry was an independent Green Member of Parliament in Tasmania from 1986. In May 1995 he resigned from the House of Assembly to contest the seat of Queenborough in the Legislative Council but was unsuccessful. He moved to NSW where he became a senior lecturer at the Universtiy of Sydney from 1996 to 1998. He has been a member of the Board of the Environment Protection Authority of NSW since 1996; a member of the State of the Environment Advisory Council since 2004, and a Director of Kimbriki Environmental Enterprises, a regional waste recovery centre and landfill on Sydney.