Meet your assembly: Caroline Le Couteur went to a festival in Nimbin and didn’t leave for 11 years

Most of the shops in the main street had closed and the hospital was shutting down so the locals welcomed the influx of thousands the Aquarius Festival brought to the town.

Le Couteur had finished an economics degree at the Australian National University the year before and wanted to use what she had learnt to create a better world.

After 10 days thousands milled out of Nimbin but Le Couteur and others remained.

She ended up staying there for 11 years in a self-sufficient community on the fringe of the northern-NSW town.

"We formed an organisation called Coordination Cooperative," Le Couteur said.

"It still is a cooperative. We are actually the biggest landowner in the Lismore shire because we bought various bits of land. About 200 people lived there, there's always been about 200 people living there and it was an absolutely great time."

Le Couteur said like herself, most in the community were "young and idealistic".

"We were creating a new better community, a Utopia," she said.

"Almost all of us were in our early 20s. I mean we did have a few older people but not many and we didn't have a really have any kids and so we started producing our own.

"We all built our own houses, there were mud brick houses houses built out of stone.

"It was a blank canvas. I thought at the time I'd die there, not that I planned on dying anytime soon, but me and most other people there thought we were going to be there for the rest of our lives."

To an extent, the community lived off the land but they still needed to bring money in.

In the late 1970s Le Couteur ended up selling early versions of solar panels.

"We were selling NASA rejects because that's all there was, no one was producing them commercially because who would buy them," she said.

"In the community I was in there was no electricity from the grid and where we were competing economically was with candles.

"One of the saddest things was a house burnt down with a candle and a baby died, that was...that was one of the reasons we went into PVs because they were a lot safer than candles and gas."

After more a decade of scraping a living off the land, the shine wore off and Le Couteur decided to return Canberra to care for her mother, who had a major stroke.

"After a while you get tired of grinding poverty," she said wryly.

Le Couteur described herself as an "accidental politician".

She was one of seven Greens who stood for election in 1998, not because she had any desire or intention to become a politician, but because she supported the party.

She stood again in 2008 as the second Green for Molonglo, only to find herself elected to the ACT Legislative Assembly.

"Nobody thought there'd be two Greens elected in Molonglo, the Greens didn't even think that," she said.

Le Couteur was one of four Greens elected that term who helped to usher in sweeping changes to the territory's education, health and public transport systems.

They also sowed the seeds for the ACT's nation-leading clean energy policies.

But a backlash at the polls in 2012 saw every Greens member, bar Shane Rattenbury, wiped out.

Getting booted from parliament was a "disappointment" but In her "gap years" she worked in shareholder activism, advocated for natural burials and enjoyed time with her two grandchildren.

But after being re-elected in October, Le Couteur said she wanted to hold the government to account on fraught issues like planning.

During the first sitting week, Le Couteur proved good on her word, rebelling against Labor and siding with the Liberals over the Land Development Agency's "integrity and probity".

"Lots of things are wrong with our planning system I think and I would really like to use this four years to be part of improving the planning system," Le Couteur said.

"Shane did a great job last term I think, given there was the one of him. One of the exciting things from the Greens point of view is that I'm going to be able to ask questions because Shane couldn't."