Richard Di Natale
After graduating from Monash University in 1993 and commencing physician training, Dr Richard Di Natale took a detour into general practice, where he worked for almost a decade. He spent several years at an Aboriginal Health service in the remote town of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory; worked at a community health service in inner Melbourne, and for several rural and remote primary health services.
He completed his Public Health training through the Victorian Public Health Training scheme, where he worked across a range of disciplines from communicable disease control, outbreak investigation, and drug treatment and upon completion become a fellow of the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine. Dr Di Natale took up a position at the Nossal Institute, working on HIV prevention among injecting drug users in the northeast Indian states of Nagaland and Manipur, where he established pharmacotherapy services and enhanced needle and syringe exchange in high prevalence communities.
Dr Di Natale was active in Greens politics for several decades, contesting state and federal elections before being elected to the Australian Senate, as Victoria’s first Greens Senator in the 2010 federal election. He was elected Federal Parliamentary Leader of the Australian Greens from 2015 to 2020, leading the Greens during the 2016 and 2019 federal elections. As federal health spokesperson Dr Di Natale helped secure almost $5 billion towards Medicare-funded dentistry, successfully campaigned to divest the future of $250 million in tobacco holdings and drove reform efforts to improve access to medicinal cannabis. He led inquiries into significant public health issues such as antimicrobial resistance, healthcare funding, air pollution, pharmaceutical industry transparency and gambling reform.
He resigned from parliament in 2020, to spend time with his young family (no, really!) and now works as a Public Health Advisor with cohealth, a large not-for-profit community health service. He is currently leading their work on the establishment of a supervised injecting service in Melbourne’s CBD, which he hopes the state government will announce soon. He is also working with cohealth to establish new multidisciplinary primary health services across Australia.
Dr Di Natale lives on a small farm in the Otway Ranges, tending his veggie patch and various animals, with his wife Lucy and two wonderful boys Luca and Ben.