Yes, Prime Minister, I'm striking from school: consider it a climate lesson

I am Veronica, 15 years old, from Scott Morrison’s electorate. Despite our Prime Minister’s calls for students not to strike from school on Friday, we’re choosing to no longer be powerless. We will be striking with thousands of other students, to show we will not stand for our government’s inaction on climate change.

Veronica Hester, a 15-year-old student from Sutherland
 Shire, who will be among young Australians striking
from school on Friday.

Mr Morrison has condemned the strike, saying he does not support our schools being turned into parliaments. “More learning and less activism,” he said. If he and our politicians listened to the climate science we have been taught, and took action like those of us in school, we wouldn’t have to resort to strike action.

In school, we have seen the raw truth of climate change: videos of our dead and dying Great Barrier Reef, increasingly shocking statistics, forecasts of a worrying future.

Seeing this, we students do not shout at each other across the classroom. We sit in a shocked silence. Afterwards, we shout, with our signs and our demands. Because how can an educated person know all we know, and do nothing?

Read the story by Veronica Hester from The Sydney Morning Herald - “Yes, Prime Minister, I'm striking from school: consider it a climate lesson.”