While in Hobart, Sanders worked as a TV journalist on the ABC current-affairs program This Day Tonight.
This was the prelude to his becoming heavily involved in Australia's nascent environmental movement, and to his directorship of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society.
He claimed that the new government, led by the Liberals' Robin Gray, was becoming totalitarian in nature over the Franklin Dam issue and, in particular, over the way in which anti-dam protesters were being treated by the state's law enforcement sector.
[2] He was a member of an Australian parliamentary delegation to the Soviet Union where he had talks with Andrei Gromyko about nuclear disarmament.
He also was on delegations to NATO, Finland, Norway, Uzbekistan, the European Parliament, France, Belgium, and China.