SCHOOL STRIKE FOR CLIMATE HAS BEEN HIJACKED BY THE GOVERNMENT

A message that probably won't be seen on the School Strike for Climate.

Maori Climate Commissioner Donna Awatere-Huata is supporting the School Strike for Climate even though it is supporting the government's market-driven climate change policies, the very policies she has previously criticised as being inadequate.

GIVEN THAT the School Strike for Climate has been hijacked by the Labour-led government and the Green Party, it comes as no surprise that heavy hitters like Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Climate Change Minister James Shaw and his fellow Green Party MP's  have all come out in support of the strike. Not to mention government appointed functionaries like Children's Commissioner Andrew Becroft and Maori Climate Commissioner Donna Awatere-Huata.

Awatere Huata's fulsome support for the school strike is curious and contradictory. In January she, to her credit, criticised the government's climate change policies:

"Our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, stated that climate change was her generations ‘nuclear-free moment’, yet when we consider actual environmental policy to date, we can conclude that this ‘moment’ is little more than a feel good nuclear free bumper sticker."

But she supports the school strike because she says that:

"These brave young New Zealanders are striking to demand adults combat climate change meaningfully and they should be free to embark upon that activism without risk of school retribution....We require an immediate re-evaluation of what adaptation efforts deserve Government support and attention because the free market has failed when it comes to climate change.'

Has Awatere-Huata actually read the strike's list of demands? I wouldn't be surprised if she hasn't because they have been conspicuously missing from the debate about the school strike and climate change generally. But there's no excuse for not knowing what they are because they on the strike's website for all to see.

They are actually in support the government's current climate change policies, the very policies that Awatere-Huata has criticised as being inadequate. In her understandable enthusiasm to support the students she seems oblivious to the fact that the students have as, NZ Herald columnist Rachel Stewart has observed, been played like pieces on a chessboard. Whether they know it or not, they are being used to promote the Labour-led government's timid climate change policies and its delusionary belief in a environmentally-friendly capitalism.

When the strike should of been demanding 'system change not climate change' -like what many youth around the word are calling for - the striking students in New Zealand are being used a convenient backdrop by James Shaw to announce  tomorrow that his disastrous market-driven Zero Carbon Bill has been completed.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Youth Strike 4 Climate is calling for system change not climate change. It says "We feel that, facing a lethal ecological crisis, we as a generation must take direct action where the older generation has failed.'