Students protesting for climate change have voiced their anger, with an organiser saying there was ‘no point’ working hard in school because of the crisis.
One of the organisers of the latest School Strike 4 Climate protests says kids don’t see the point in trying hard in class while the Federal Government ignores their call to move to renewable energy.
Hundreds of school kids rallied in the rain outside Sydney’s Town Hall on Friday as part of nationwide activism calling for a shift in Australia’s climate policies.
Natasha Abhayawickrama, 16, said the youth walked out of school because they believed creating a “disruption” was the only way their voices would be heard.
“We don’t understand the point of working so hard in school when we’re graduating to a future which is just going to be full of extreme environmental event after extreme environmental event,” she said.
Natasha, from Sydney’s northwest, said her peers were scared of the future and would not stop protesting until the government saw the climate crisis “for what it is”.
She claimed moving to renewable energies in place of fossil fuels would be cheaper and create more jobs.
The government’s recent decision to allocate $600m to build a new gas plant in the Hunter Region showed they were out of touch.
“We won’t stop protesting until they see the climate crisis for what it is, a crisis,” she said.
“We’ve tried writing letters, protests after school, on weekends but simply we’ve just seen that we can’t make an impact if we don’t strike when people are paying attention.
“We have to create a distraction, create a disturbance in order to get attention.”