Students’ climate change strike is a walk in the park

The wolves are at the door. The barbarians are at the gate. In the streets of our major cities, the Visigoths and Vandals come in the form of spotty-faced, badly dressed humans, bearing backpacks, bottled water and moral certainty.  

By mid-afternoon, capitalism could be a tyre fire and by the morning, our new overlord could be a 15-year-old girl who likes hip-hop, chatting with friends on FaceTime and global conquest.    

In response to the national and global rallies, Australian commentators invoked Stalin, Lenin and Mao. Boil them all up in your Pol Pot and we’re good to go.

More particularly, the arguments went, the spotty-faced ones should be sent to their rooms and be given no Marxist dialectics for supper.

Then it is only a matter of time before we are dragged out of our cars while waiting at the drive through of fast food restaurants, and torn limb from limb. The newspaper boy could be planning to burn our houses to the ground.

It has all got a bit silly.  

My question is, when did we become opposed to freedoms of assembly, association, movement and expression?

Hundreds of thousands of the nation’s kids will enjoy these freedoms today and express their fears and frustrations at the uncertainty of their future and that of the planet we all live on.   

You don’t have to like it, you don’t even have to understand it, but you should respect it.

Frankly, I don’t think our federal parliamentarians have got a dog in this fight or if they do it is a toothless cavoodle who remains stubbornly asleep on the couch.

When asked about hashtag climatestrike, Bill Shorten had five bob each way, as Bill is prone to do.

“Kids are allowed to have opinions,” he said yesterday. But there was a caveat. There always is with Bill. “In an ideal world, they would protest after school hours and on weekends.”

He went on to say the government had been “On strike about climate policy for the last five-and-a-half years.”

“(Scott Morrison and his government) are really not the best role models for the kids on climate policy, are they?”

I would have thought a former union boss would understand the basic principles of a strike but there you go. His comments were more than an each-way bet. Bill took two fields in the quinella with a complicated boxed trifecta thrown in for good measure.

I’d love to be his bookie.

On the other side of the divide, Liberal senator, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells decided to blame Tony Abbott’s opponent in Warringah, Zali Steggall.

“Why,” the Senator tweeted, “is Zali Steggal encouraging kids to wag school to go to a climate rally? Kids shouldn’t be brainwashed but if they really want to protest, let it be on their own time.”

The federal parliament has sat for a neat seven days in 2019. By the May election, it will be nine days. Over the same period, school students around the country have been in the classroom for 90.

Seven sitting days to date. If our federal parliamentarians took a leaf out of the students’ book and went on strike, how would we know the difference?

Seriously, if the Canberra mob decided to pull the pin, how would we even tell?

According to Finance Minister, Matthias Cormann, wages in Australia should be linked to productivity. By my back of the envelope calculations, the productivity of federal MPs is down a whopping 800 per cent on previous year and that’s not based on an excruciating time and motion analysis but merely on the days they bother to turn up. Yet, at the end of each month the Commonwealth pays your bog ordinary MP a base salary of almost $17,000 and that doesn’t include perks, a car and too may expense allowances to list here.

I could also mention that in the dark days of the August spill last year the doors to the House of Representatives were locked shut because the government feared it would lose its majority on the floor and be hurled off the Treasury benches.

Truth be told, it was more lock out than a strike. But the fact remains, when it comes to our MPs, it is a case of the old teacher’s axiom, do as I say, not as I do.

By the time you read this article, hundreds of thousands of children will have gathered in the nation’s capitals and regional cities. There is bound to be a bit of bad language, amusing and sometimes rude placards and a bit of good-natured hoppo-bumpo with the rozzers.  

We shouldn’t be too bothered about this either. It is the job of youth to mock authority. Indeed, if they didn’t do it, I’d be worried. I would fear the generation, sometimes called the i-Generation but more properly referred to as millennials, were nothing more than a race of sullen automatons staring at their phones. That they are to a degree politically active and informed is cause for celebration not condemnation.  

A month ago, we had actual Nazis congregating on St Kilda Beach. At the time, I heard no apocalyptic predictions from the commentariat. Indeed, the general view then was that these people, appalling as they are, were entitled to congregate, meander about menacingly and generally be as awful as they possibly can be.

And that view is the correct one. Again, you don’t have to like it, but you should respect it.  

By comparison with that ugly little episode, the climate rallies held today will be a walk in the park.

Take a packed lunch, kids. Drink plenty of water. Pack a jumper. Don’t catch a chill. Enjoy your freedoms. Have your say. Oh, and apply sun block. The sun’s a killer these days.

This column was first published in The Australian on 15 March, 2019.