Student Joanne Tran: Climate change strike students need to learn basic economics

Classmates and climate change activists calling on me to skip school to save the planet should first study basic economics, writes Year 12 student Joanne Tran

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Hundreds of thousands of school students around the world will be skipping school on Friday as part of a protest organised by activist group School Strike for Climate.

One of the group’s many justifications for encouraging minors to skip school is to “save our future from climate-wrecking projects”.

Many of the students who are being targeted by the group to not attend school are from Australia. Many are my classmates.

Burwood Girls School Year 12 student Joanne Tran won't be skipping school to protest climate change. Picture: Dylan Robinson

But I am one of the millions of school kids around the world and in Australia who will be not be marching today, and who instead choose to attend school.

“Why? Don’t you care about the environment?” many school pals and others have asked me.

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Well, consider this an open letter to both my schoolmates and the organisers of the protest about why I won’t be missing out on a day of my education to join them.

The School Strike for Climate claims that its goal is to send a message to the government to “save our future”.

However the group’s real mission is to advance a progressive policy agenda against an innocent group of children.

The group’s website, created by the activists (many of whom are adults and come from partisan backgrounds) tries to justify their encouragement of kids to skip school by saying that there needs to be urgent action to move Australia beyond fossil fuel projects such as the Carmichael Coal mine targeted by #StopAdani activists to get the job done of moving us to “100 per cent renewable energy for all”.

At one time I, too, would have implicitly accepted this proposition at face value.

This began to change once I read more widely on the topic and was exposed to new ideas after taking economics as one of my HSC subjects.

Wrongly spelled signs at the School Strike for Climate in Sydney in November. Picture: Jenny Evans

Economics was the first-ever subject where my classmates and I no longer heard lines including “coal/mining is terrible and will be the end of us”.

These type of complaints are stock standard within a school system where the curriculum skews obviously to the left.

For the first time in my school career, I started to hear about how important commodities such as coal, iron ore and LNG are to Australian industry and our nation’s output.

In our strong and stable economy, more than 51 per cent of our total exports came from commodities, delivering Australia’s second-largest trade surplus on record.

How could a country such as ours, benefiting immensely from the prosperity brought by exporting our natural resources to the rest of the world — including its poorest — forget that this is why we have such an enviable standard of living?

Public revenue from mining and taxes generated by the goods produced through the electricity and energy generated from our resources, has allowed us to deliver world-class public healthcare and education.

Last year’s rally attracted hundreds of students. Picture: Jenny Evans

Yet these activists describe the very projects that built our nation, and which millions of us directly or indirectly depend on for our livelihoods, as “wrecking projects”.

They do this while asking children to opt out of the education that they once benefited from, in order to protest the very things that helped create it.

The lack of knowledge and failure to acknowledge these basic facts among the children stepping out to protest is what scares me the most, and it should scare you too.

It is this ignorance, due to no fault of their own besides the failure of our education system to expose them to the ideas they need to understand the world, that makes them the perfect political pawns for activists and their agendas.

A great education is a holistic one. An education that features both sides of the argument.

It should not have taken me 11 years of schooling to finally have taken a class that even acknowledges the importance of the mining sector to Australian life and its contribution to the world.

Unfortunately, economics is not taken by the vast majority of students.

In fact, I would argue that it is one of the less popular subjects among those offered.

This means that many students will reach the age where they will vote in hopes for a better future, without a full understanding of what is important for the strong economy needed for that.

Worse yet, those of us who speak our mind are increasingly intimidated into silence by the mob who have fallen prey to an agenda sold by activists and enabled by the very system that is supposed to prepare us for our futures.

Joanne Tran is a Year 12 student in Sydney