Page 3365 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 19 October 2022
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Despite all of this, young people are still doing what they can to help, including myself. I buy almost all of my clothes second hand, or I make them myself. I don’t eat meat very often because of the water usage it takes to create it. I recycle everything possible. I pick up litter when I see it, and I encourage the people in my life to do what they can to help too. But this is not enough to fix the problem.
Isabel will probably have my job before I am prepared to give it up.
I believe it was former Prime Minister Scott Morrison who at one point admonished those of us who care about climate change not to frighten the children. Perhaps there are some in this chamber who think that Isabel should not have been taught those things at school and think that the solution is censorship in the classroom. That is certainly happening in some parts of the United States.
Are we simply supposed to tell them comforting lies instead? Surely, at some point, knowing that you have been lied to only adds to what Mr Morrison described as, “needless anxiety”. But is it needless? Is it really? The anxiety seems all too appropriate to me. The median age of the Australian person is 38 years, as of 2021. I am below that age myself. And I share all of the anger, frustration, fear and determination that work experience students like Isabel in my office have demonstrated, like in this powerful piece of writing. Shame on us for doing this to our kids and to our young people.
We are certainly not making it easier for everyone to be climate ready either. We know that the people most at risk in our community are also the most worse off. If you are a renter, like so many young people are, you get very little say on whether your rental uses gas cooking or gas heating. When money is tight, doctor bills take up a criminally large portion of your salary. If you are made to choose between groceries or a visit to the doctor to find out something is wrong and expensive, I know which I would pick. I know which I have picked.
When we start tackling health and climate change, I trust that as a progressive, community-oriented jurisdiction we will, and we must, centre on the economically vulnerable. We know prevention is better than cure, and it would be a disservice to both them and to us to rob some people of the opportunity to protect their own health.
According to the ACT’s Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment, Dr Sophie Lewis, developing traditional evidence-based policy will not equip us for this frightening future, either, because the future is unprecedented. We will not be able to act only on existing data; we will need to act on imagination and anticipation as well. We saw this with the fires three summers ago. There were predictions and planning for fire, but not for the smoke. It turns out that MRI machines cannot run in the smoke. It turns out that babies gestated in a smoke-filled atmosphere are born underweight. It turns out that people do not just need indoor heat refuges; they need indoor smoke refuges as well.
In my office, we have heard from so many Canberrans struggling to breathe, not just from serious disasters like bushfires but also from smoke over the fence from the
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