STRIKE ACTION PLAN
PARENTS are scrambling to organise care for their children as teachers at 152 Tasmanian schools prepare to walk off the job this week in their fight for a better pay deal. Teachers will turn up late to school after stopwork meetings in the state’s North and North-West tomorrow and in the South on Wednesday. The onus is on individual schools to advise parents on how the strike will affect them.
AMELIE Hudspeth will leave school early on Thursday to take a stand on climate change as part of a nationwide grassroots action led by Australian children.
She’s just one of potentially hundreds of Tasmanian students who will leave early — with our without their parents’ consent — to attend a #ClimateStrike rally outside Parliament House in Hobart.
“I’m really motivated to be a part of this because I think climate change is a really important issue,” the Year 9 Kingston High School student said. “It’s a crisis. Our politicians are not doing enough to protect our future. It’s a really big issue for young Australians, but because we can’t vote, we can’t get our views across to politicians.”
Ms Hudspeth, who will be speaking at the event, is a member of the Student Climate Action Network — a subgroup of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, which is helping to run the event.
“Obviously it’s a really serious thing to leave school as it will be marked down as an unexplained absence, but this is a totally organic student action,” Will Boon of the AYCC said.
“It isn’t centrally organised so it’s hard to say how many will attend. There are lots of groups supporting the event. It’s broadly a blanket call for any action to combat climate change.”
Rallies will also be held in regional communities such as the Huon Valley, where students from several schools will meet at Loongana Park in Cygnet at 2pm.
“With successive Liberal and Labor governments serially failing to act to reverse the climate breakdown and the unprecedented extinction crisis, it’s inevitable that people power — or in this instance, children power — will take over,” Wilderness Society campaigner Tom Allen said.
“It’s both fitting and saddening that it’s the children who will inherit the future that are having to tell the grownups who are destroying it what needs to happen. For once, it’s adults who need to listen to the children.”