Party’s former leader says she aims not to get too at home in chamber she wants abolished

The latest – and only the second – Green member of the House of Lords has pledged to be an activist peer and continue to take part in protests over fracking and other issues – seeing arrest as a potential occupational hazard.

Natalie Bennett, who was the party’s leader for four years, including at the 2015 election, conceded that like her only predecessor as a Green peer, Jenny Jones, she would remain an outsider in a chamber that she and her party want to abolish.

“The job is to make sure you don’t get too at home there,” she said. “But I’m also going to still be at anti-fracking camps, out there protesting for refugee rights. It’s about hearing all of those voices and representing them in the chamber. As long as you remember that. And it’s a comfortable place to be if you’re making other people uncomfortable.”

This could even involve joining the very small club of peers to be arrested for civil disobedience, she said. “Jenny was arrested and then de-arrested. It won’t be something I’ll be setting out to do, but I will still be very much on the streets. It won’t be my aim but I’m not saying it won’t happen either.”

Bennett, a former journalist – including for the Guardian – who grew up in Australia, said she was a seemingly unlikely peer in other ways. “I was born the child of a 19-year-old apprentice carpenter and an 18-year-old homemaker, who lived in a one-bedroom flat in a poor area of Sydney,” she said. “You wouldn’t have predicted that’s where I’d end up.”

She has a degree in agricultural science and said part of her focus on the climate and environmental emergency would include areas such as land use and food security. This is likely to include action over the environmental impact of driven grouse shooting, something Labour has also pledged to review – and which could bring Bennett into opposition with landowner peers in her new workplace.

“It’s extreme, abusive land use, but it’s a symbol of how we have to change the whole of land use,” she said.

Bennett, who still has to discuss with Lords officials which part of Sheffield, where she lives, she will use for her title, noted that while the Greens now had three parliamentary representatives – her and Jones in the Lords, and Caroline Lucas in the Commons – this was still 0.2% of the combined total of MPs and peers for a party that took 12% of the vote in May’s European elections.

She said a key part of her message in the Lords, aside from its abolition, would be wider democratic reform such as proportional representation, as the current electoral system had created many problems.

“People need to be represented. And the 2016 referendum result was a direct result of the first-past-the-post electoral system. People feel like they hadn’t been listened to for decades and have no control in their own communities.”

One advantage of the chaos over Brexit, she said was the pace of political change. “It’s utterly unpredictable political times. One thing I think is good news is the way things are now is profoundly unstable. The status quo will not continue.”