‘If you did your job, we’d be in school’
AROUND 250 youth and adults gathered on Friday, September 20, at Victoria Park in the early stages of a global Mexican Wave of climate action which saw millions around the world take to the streets.
The School Strike 4 Climate 2019 Australia is demanding there be no new coal, oil and gas projects, including the Adani mine, that this country sets a target of 100 per cent renewable energy generation and exports by 2030, and budgets funds for a just transition and job creation for all fossil-fuel workers and communities.
Student climate striker Harry Kater told the youth and adults attending the Dubbo march that the students would be in school if policy makers had done their job.
“The motivation for the strike is simple. As the youth, we don’t get a say, yet are going to be the ones who deal with the consequences of today’s environmental policies. Put simply we want commitment and effort that will result in action. Not just empty promises and accusations,” he said.
Nine-year-old Isaac Johnston from Wellington Public School said he was attending the march to stop people polluting.
“I’m worried about it. I want to tell the politicians to stop digging up fossil fuels,” he said.
Uniting Church minister Peter Harvey also attended to show his support for the youth and church members, particularly in the South Pacific.
“The reality is our world is dying. The Uniting Church has a lot of contact, particularly with Pacific Island nations, and the stories that are coming out of that area (show that) the reality of global warming just can’t be denied. We’re talking about people’s lives and the future of our world,” he said.
Dubbo Regional Council Deputy Mayor Stephen Lawrence joined the strike saying he’s a strong believer in the climate science.
“I’ve managed to have conversations with quite a few of them and none that I spoke to had permission to be here. The kids from the Central West Leadership Academy are the only kids actually allowed to be here by their school,” Cr Lawrence told Dubbo Photo News.
“I wanted to come and show my support. I’m a strong believer in the climate science and the need for us as a society to take a stand and implement stronger policies.”
Ten-year-old student striker Finn Randell addressed the crowd during speeches in Victoria Park.
“We are in the midst of a climate crisis. Forty billion tonnes of carbon dioxide are being dumped into the atmosphere annually and each year of the 21st century sets a new record for heat,” Mr Randell said.
“To stop this oncoming disaster, we all need to make a change. Emissions are the most troubling problem. Most of the energy we get relies on burning fossil fuels such as coal and gas. Burning these substances creates gases like carbon dioxide and methane which go into the atmosphere and trap heat inside our planet. Yet we can still change this if we come together,” he said.
The public’s reaction to the students as they marched through the CBD was mixed and included adults shouting at them to go back to school.
Resident Red Dwyer who watched the students pass on Talbragar Street had a different take. “They’re young kids, they’re effervescent. They’ve got something under their skin,” Mr Dwyer said, adding that it was a good way for youth to participate in the community.
“I’ve got no objection,” he said.
Climate striker Evie Wells felt the way forward would not be easy.
“It’s tough to become completely green because everything is so ingrained and it’s hard to shake that, but I think that’s the trap,” she said.
FOLLOWING the Student Strike 4 Climate in Dubbo last Friday (which was also a Global Climate Strike calling on anyone to protest government inaction on the issue), it allowed for a sneak peek into the community’s diversity of thought on the protest.
Local students, some with school permission, many without, took up the mantle to march in orderly fashion with parents, the deputy mayor, and some smiling policemen, along Macquarie and Talbragar Streets.
It wasn’t surprising to witness the odd grown-up getting swept up by the spirit of protest to shout at the youth, from the other side of the street, “Go back to school!” or “They’re not even wearing their school uniforms!”
Would the Education Minister of Queensland have had those adults detained and questioned for protesting too, as he suggested is an apt response to individuals exercising their democratic rights in a democratic country?
That used to be so beautiful one day and perfect the next – democratic rights that is.
On the flip side, shop keepers emerged from their businesses to encourage the youth.
Another pedestrian audibly said the youth ought to ‘just get over it’ because ‘she had to grow up in the Cold War’.
Certainly, the Cold War could have got very atomically hot, but that generation of youth were also taught hiding under prison-issue timber tables at school would protect them from a splitting atom.
` Another elderly gentleman said he thought it was good to see the youth exercising their political voice over issues which directly affect them... a
Duffers.
These days the buzz word in education is STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) so the youth of today can read and understand enough of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to heed its message and do something about it.
Another elderly gentleman said he thought it was good to see the youth exercising their political voice over issues which directly affect them.
The Australian federal election in 2022 will welcome many students of today as voters and on social media they’re getting very organised to raise up politicians who do put the climate first and their futures along with it.
Admittedly, one women’s comment, again shouted as if volume denoted authority, caught my attention the most, because she called out my son’s name.
Standing at a stall in front of the post office on Talbragar Street she hollered: “What are you doing!? You should be in school!”
She seemed concerned for him, but as I don’t know her and have no history of her ever showing any interest in my son’s wellbeing in the past, I found her demeanour peculiar.
I did wonder would she have shouted in the same way if she’d spotted him in the crowd on a Wednesday waiting to see Prince Harry and Meghan from a great distance participating in an event which would have no productive impact on his future wellbeing except perhaps a momentary thrill?
In five or ten years’ time it will be me, not her, that has to look my kids in their eyes and tell them, “Sorry, but your life didn’t matter enough,” or, “I did what I could to make the world a better place.”
They know where I stand because, oddly, I agree with a Catholic nun, Mother Teresa, who said: “It’s the greatest poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”