Retired protesters should pay more attention to the kids
Extinction Rebellion retirees may think they’re doing the right thing for young Australians, but most teens wouldn’t be caught dead with their heads in the sand, writes Claire Harvey.
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First the old people took over Facebook. Then hoodies.
Now lawless protesting is the latest territory to be colonised by middle-aged to elderly personages who claim they’re doing it all for the kids. Have you noticed? Those Extinction Rebellion scallywags nailing themselves to lampposts in major cities throughout Australia — they’re all pension-age or approaching. That means they’ve got gold Opal cards and unlimited time on their hands, and they don’t give a crap if the rest of us are late to work or get a fine for late daycare pick-up: they’ve got nothing to do until Gardening Australia on Friday night.
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Honestly, you could barely see the banners at this week’s Manly Beach head-burying session for the forest of capri pants and sensibly broadbrimmed sunhats. The ones with dreadlocks had suspiciously high foreheads even for 45-year-olds: (that’s called traction alopecia, people: you’re accelerating your own baldness with those braids).
I totally agree with Extinction Rebellion, by the way, that there’s a climate emergency. I admire their enthusiasm. I just don’t think they’re going to win a single new friend by stapling their fingernails to downtown rubbish bins.
I was in Sydney’s CBD on Tuesday, as the exhausted but happy Extinction Rebellion protesters made their way home from state parliament, having successfully irritated and inconvenienced every employed person in the city as well as the underpaid emergency services workers, like cops and ambos, who had to peel them out of whatever bollard they’d concreted themselves to.
Beside me at a cafe on Tuesday afternoon sat two pension-age ladies reminiscing about the demo they’d just attended and bemoaning the Labor Party’s failure to be more aggro. For the grandkids.
But when actual kids protest about climate, as we’ve seen, they go for the elegant minimalism of Greta Thunberg: wag school and make a cardboard sign. Maybe do some theatrical crying for the SBS cameras. That’s about the extent of their commitment. They’ve got other stuff going on.
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Imagine the embarrassment those very children feel when they get home from the big day of demonstrating to see Nanna and Uncle Neil on TV getting unbolted from a railway track by a 25-year-old paramedic, or emerging from the lockup after 17 hours without food because they refused to tell the duty constable their full name.
And why would a mob like Extinction Rebellion, which you’d think was more classically aimed at a ‘yoof’ audience, be so appealing for the elderly?
Well, just check out XR’s goals: they’re demanding governments around the world create a citizen’s assembly to determine climate policy.
Is this ringing any bells? Yep, Julia Gillard came up with exactly this idea — a citizens’ assembly to undertake a year-long consultation period — just before the 2010 election (shortly after which she completely abandoned the idea).
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The big problem, as Ms Gillard found out, is how you’d create such an assembly, and how you’d get people to show up, to take it seriously, to not sit there farting and sulking, or sneaking out the back for a ciggie — just like a school assembly, really. A report in the Age announcing the Gillard idea in 2010 said: “Few details will be given about how the citizens’ assembly would operate, other than that an independent authority would select people from the electoral roll using census data. Membership would be optional.”
Well, that was a relief. Here I was getting worried I’d be dragged from my living room in the middle of The Bachelor to take part in a slow-motion cage-fight with people I’d never met, all to help parliament do the job we elect parliaments to do.
If you’ve ever ducked your head into a court during a criminal trial, you’ll have noted the jury is full of old people, as are the public benches inside the courtroom, where underemployed retirees come to pass a few hours of a morning.
These people are Extinction Rebellion. They are just bored. They want grandkids. Then they’ll be too tired to protest. Just like the rest of us.