Students to skip class for climate protests

Wellington’s school students are walking out of class today, demanding the Government take “real and immediate” action to cut climate change and ensure a “sustainable, fair and healthy” society.

It’s only one of more than 20 school strikes to be held across the country today, including in Auckland, Christchurch, Palmerston North and Invercargill.

School Strike 4 Climate Pōneke said students would meet at Civic Square at noon before marching to Parliament.

One of its advocates, Nate Wilbourne, said policies such as scrapping the clean car discount and redirecting climate funds in its mini Budget, showed New Zealand was “going backwards” on climate change.

The group also wanted an increase in climate education for all and halting the Government’s fast-track consent bill which could give ministers power to approve new projects outside the Resource Management Act (RMA), speeding up infrastructure builds.

Wilbourne said the Government needed to “start climate change seriously”, and its “lack of acknowledgement of the impending climate crisis” was encouraging “ignorance towards these issues”.

“We cannot have a bill in place that allows the removal of public input and, through the decision-making of three Ministers, approve or deny any projects while being able to override the usual checks and balances in place to protect Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the environment,” he said.

“It is a simply undemocratic bill that will enable the Government to put us on a fast track to environmental destruction to uplift the interests and the profits of large corporations.”

School Strike 4 Climate Pōneke member Frankie Huthnance said the impacts of climate change were felt everywhere but the Government was “all talk and no action”.

“We are facing a climate crisis right now. The devastation from Auckland Anniversary Weekend flooding and Cyclone Gabrielle last year saw people lose their lives, their homes and their livelihoods. This year, wildfires threatened those in Christchurch’s Port Hills,” she said.

Last year’s school strike for climate in the capital attracted more than 200 students of various ages demanding Te Tiriti-centred climate decision-making, a full transition to regenerative agriculture and 50% reduction in emissions by 2030, as well as lowering the voting age to 16.

OraTaiao: NZ Climate and Health Council said it supported the group’s demands and it “wrote a prescription” for people of all ages and locations to join the march. “As health workers, we know that our changing climate is the biggest threat to human health and planetary wellbeing,” co-convenor Dermot Coffey said in a statement.