Raising a Generation of Junior Jackbooters

Australian schoolkids get multiple forms of green/Left indoctrination (for a partial list click here). Conservative state and federal governments do nothing about this and even promote it. But how well are kids actually absorbing the green/Left narrative? Very well indeed, is my guess. Judging from copious material I’ve been sifting, schools are training a generation of horrid little eco-tyrants hot to embark on the mightiest state planning and control makeover since Stalin destroyed private agriculture and re-introduced mass slavery.

 “Young Australians’ Plans for the Planet” — an astounding trove — involves myriad pages of kids’ takes on social issues. They were organised by local climate zealots to support the United Nation’s 17 “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) for 2030. The UN’s eight “Millennium Development Goals” for 2000-15 did great work reducing indicators like childbirth mortality and extreme poverty. But the 17 SDGs are a joke on “inclusiveness”, involving 169 sub-targets and no prioritisations (“End poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all”). Indeed the UN’s original SDG draft involved 1400 indiscriminate goals proposed by 120 organisations.

Our locals organised about 240 kids from Year 10, drawn from [1] 20 high schools nationally, to flesh out kids’ own plans for Australia out to 2050. The kids and supervising teachers did the eight months’ extra-curricular work during 2016-19,  stopping when COVID-19 intervened. The superstructure was bigger than Ben Hur. The exercise went international with kids from Mauritius (10 schools, 120 kids) and Singapore endorsing the template. Asia, Africa and North America wait in the wings.

The local organisers were: Questacon and Inspiring Australia (the National Science and Technology Centre run within the Department of Industry), the green-Left Academy of Science and its affiliate Future Earth, UN Youth Australia, six universities led by the ANU’s woke vice-chancellor and Nobelist Brian Schmidt, and green fanatics such as Beyond Zero Emissions and OnePlanet Partnership.

The 240 kid volunteers are probably a green-biased sample (if you know of any free-market warming-sceptic school groups out there somewhere, please let me know). Actually some of the  kids taking part occasionally went off-message: an outlier even urged debate and polling on nuclear power, and some others were gung-ho for a gas pipeline from PNG and a gas-powered electricity plant to help North Queensland’s industry – climate Armageddon be damned. The mainstream want a green socialist nirvana where governments dictate how we live and work, and ensure we think only proper thoughts about renewables.

I’m not blaming kids for what teachers have dinned into them; I’m sure kids’ hearts are in the right place. But here goes, fasten your seat-belts, because here is what the junior jackbooters think is needed to confront that climate emergency we’re always hearing about.

♦ “Stop the debate as climate change is real.”

♦ Kids want their parents to be slugged with a carbon tax, plus 50 per cent hikes in both petrol prices and car insurance. (Mum and Dad to kid: “Gee thanks, Fiona, that’s just what our family needs.”)

♦ WA kids: “Go to the federal government and ask them to put through a law saying all vehicle owners need to drive an electric vehicle by 2030.” (Even the uber-progressive Canberra kids want only an 80 per cent cut in normal cars by 2040).

♦ New coal mines are banned and coal and petroleum replaced “with a job-rich, clean energy economy.” The kids say that our green jobs can grow by 28 per cent per annum, which on my calculations suggests nearly 60 million green jobs by 2050.[2]

♦ Central planners are to decrease fossil fuel exports (the lifeblood of the Australian economy) and increase exports of “sustainably farmed crops and livestock.”[3]

♦ Federal and sng tate legislation for mandatory use of biofuels in vehicles, aircraft and off-grid electricity production.

♦ “Increase fuel excise on non-biofuels with all funds invested back into biofuels technology and development.”

♦ WA kids: “We aim to stop live export by any means completely. We want live exports to be completely illegal and those who will break this law will get a reasonable punishment.”

♦ “Legislation/guidelines as to where a shop can import from, based on their location.” (This is to support local production, never mind any advantages of trade).

♦ The kids want the government to snuff out “infamously” water-intensive crops like cotton and rice, “while providing viable alternatives”. I assume the NSW Premier sets up a Ministry of Artichokes & Pineapples.

♦ WA kids want farmers to be levied “4 per cent of their output or $2 billion a year” to stock “community fridges” available to anyone wanting a feed. (Fat chance that teachers would know that WA farm output isn’t $50 billion, it’s $11 billion).

♦ “New laws” should place quotas of women in high-paid male-dominated sectors.[4] Workplaces should run compulsory courses against sexism. (comparable, I assume, to current compulsory safety courses.)

♦ A steadily increasing tax on sugar-laced foods, while subsidising fruit and veges for the poor. The sugar tax to be followed by something called a “trans-fat tax”.

♦ Kids want to teach farmers how to run their farms, imagining that profligate farmers are over-spraying fertilisers and pesticides, heedless of cost. Farm problems can, of course, be ‘solved’ by government funding for increased farmer wages, the kids explain. “It would make sense that we all pay for agriculture through tax.”

Australians were once famed as rugged individualists. But today’s snowflake kids want a taxpayer-funded program for free beach umbrellas to combat sunburn, and taxpayer-paid seaside sunscreen dispensers. Students from households on less than $80,000 a year should get taxpayer-paid lunches.

The NSW kids, who have been familiarised with green politics, write:

Australia previously had a carbon tax under the Gillard government that lasted from 2011-14.[5] Unfortunately there was extreme backlash towards this and it was repealed in July 2014…

The introduction of a Carbon Tax could be a potentially viable way of reducing the state’s dependence on coal and fossil fuels as it becomes more expensive to use them.

The NSW kids have got the climate-catastrophe panic prose down pat:

We have 18 months to reduce impact of climate change until irreversible damage including unadaptable changes for animals according to the UN.

The 18 months are now up, kids, and global temperatures actually fell in June to a range last seen 20 years ago.

Schoolkids, who’ve learnt so much engineering from their teachers, envisage

teaching the community the benefits of renewable energy and dissipating the myths surrounding solar/wind farms (that they are too loud, look unattractive in the countryside).

A reminder, kids: they’re also intermittent.

The union movement has tumbled from 51 per cent of the workforce in 1976 to a under 14 per cent today, with the education sector probably the most strongly unionised. It appears that union supporters have invaded the classrooms to shore up future membership. Here’s kids’ reflections:

Creating jobs in the renewable energy sector that are attractive, high salary and have good unions …  All organisations should have equal pay policies and employee access to third party pay negotiators. Funding from government to allow people to have access to a third party negotiator… Organise various third party negotiators for the government/businesses to readily supply for employers and employees … By communicating with their government prior to a job interview, an employee will be able to access a third party to negotiate pay.

Combatting unemployment is seen as the job of “schools unions and unemployment benefit centres” –  employers don’t rate a mention.

On Clean Energy goals — the need for baseload power is typically overlooked — coal miners are seen deftly transitioning to solar energy jobs and “the price of electricity will drop to more affordable prices for all communities.” Actually, kids, studies show that the more solar/wind wattage a country has, the dearer its electricity. In NSW, electricity is to be 100 per cent renewable by 2030. Heaven help fridge-owners during wind droughts.

The kids’ push for electric cars would be aided by taxpayer grants to buyers and free access to bus lanes, toll roads and ferries. Since the kids want electric cars to swamp the roads, bus drivers and ferry operators will be cursing.[6]

As to CO2 in the atmosphere, currently 416 parts per million, the kids believe it can be sucked down legislatively or by technology to 366ppm in 2030 and to 330ppm in 2050. It was previously at 330ppm in 1975, an era when Asian and African peasants were starving from lack of mechanisation.

The nadir of the kids’ teacher-supervised output comes from a Perth high school. Its 31 planet-savers aim to re-shape human society and revise the Western Enlightenment, but they first need more instruction on grammar and spelling. For example, “This an extra income a little bit more unrestricted.” I wouldn’t normally care but I would have expected teachers to correct kids’ grammar in a public document for clients like the Prime Minister and the Academy of Science. Perhaps the teachers’ command of basic grammar and coherence is no better than that of their indoctrinated charges.

These kids, in their plan for quality education, say,

Also to improve the staff work ethic so we can (sic) quality teachers over a quantity of average teachers (sic) … More important Topics come first an aren’t just restricted to being taught by one person yelling out information expecting others to take notes.

Understandably, they want the school budget to finance a therapist. These kids lobby for “Quality teachers … performance management salary based incentives” – a good thing but sounds odd from the mouths of babes.

During the planning exercise WA had some drought so the kids’ plan reads,

The amount of drought is reduced by at least 35% in the heavily drought affected areas.

Almost as ambitious as planning the weather is halting WA coral bleaching for the first time in about 26 million years.

Reduce the temperature of sea water by trying to reduce the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere that lead to global warming that lead to coral bleaching.

The budding civil engineers want to turn Argyle, Australia’s second-largest dam, into a Malcolm Turnbull-style Snowy 2.0: “Get a huge pump to pump water up pipes. Power the pump by a nearby solar farm that has to be made.”

Kids nationally bemoan water scarcity but seem unaware of green bans on vital new dams and catchments. Some are also clueless but zealous about construction materials, claiming that inter-city water pipes should be converted to copper because copper is the “most affordable” material (recent price $A13,000 per tonne). They know better than water boards how to prevent leaks – boards must apply anti-rust coatings “for all pipes made of a Ferris (sic) metal.”

The ACT kids are demanding the honoring of the 2015 Paris climate pledges – notwithstanding that all pledges are discretionary. They urge their fellow young  to lobby the Australian curriculum authority to include climate change teaching “in collaboration with students” who clearly know what’s what. Like the WA kids, the ACT kids lobby, curiously, for higher teacher pay, more teacher support, benefits and longer annual leave (six weeks’ Christmas leave plus term breaks are apparently not enough). Need one be corroded by cynicism to guess who has been planting in kids’ heads the notion that teachers need more pay and fewer hours?

Kids meanwhile should be able to change their legal sex identity without the inconvenience of gender assignment surgery, according to the NSW kids. This looks a bit esoteric for Year 10s but nothing in today’s education surprises me.

In other kids’ miscellany, violent Aboriginals are incarcerated because they’re victimised: “We need to uproot biased judges and make sure all trials are fair.” And in what must be news to NSW loggers, kids inform us that “The NSW Government also needs to stop subsidising the native forests logging industry with the people’s tax money.”

My first recommendation is that woke teachers and green do-gooders stop shoving their perverse and naive pet causes down kids’ throats. Second, jettison this whole idea that we’ll get any wisdom from teenagers’ hormone-fevered brains. The kids are in school to learn stuff and acquire some worldly knowhow. When they’ve flown the parental coop, paid their own way and experienced the real world’s rigors, their views might be worth a listen.

Until then, kids can ponder Greta Thunberg’s latest message: “The audience has grown weary. This show is over. Thank you”

Tony Thomas’s just-published “Foot Soldier in the Culture Wars” ($29.95) is available from author at tthomas061@gmail.com or publisher Connor Court.

[1] If you imagine the UN is a noble organisation, keep in mind that the China is taking over key committees; the founder of the UN Environmental Program Maurice Strong got sprung with a corrupt cheque for $US988,000; the 2013-14 President of the General Assembly John Ashe (Antigua) enjoyed the proceeds of at least $US1.3 million in bribes and died pending his trial; and UN peace-keeping forces have been hotbeds of child sex abuse. The Age reported in 2006 that two Jordanian soldiers with the UN Peacekeeping Force in East Timor were evacuated home with injured penises after attempting intercourse with goats.

[2] Based on 27,000 jobs in renewables in 2018-19.

[3] The kids believe our fossil fuel export subsidies total $12 billion a year – a canard probably from the Greens Party. Tim Flannery’s Climate Council puts the subsidies at $4b a year, which is still ludicrous. The “subsidies” are in fact largely refunds of fuel taxes to prevent double-taxation.

[4] “ Increase the number of women in influential positions/positions of power by 50% in 5 years. Increase the number of women in positions of power by 10% each year.”

[5] In PM Gillard’s immortal or immoral words, “There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.”

[6] Buses and trams would have sensors to dob in traffic violators, and the public transport system would get 25% of the fines – bounty-hunting by behemoths