Liberal MPs have called for more school chaplains to calm kids down about the looming and very real dangers posed by climate change, The Guardian reports, instead of just, you know, addressing the issues at their root.
Liberal MP Andrew Wallace told the party room on Tuesday that groups like Extinction Rebellion and GetUp were stoking fear about climate change and “robbing children of hope”.
He said that it’s similar to how kids in the 70s and 80s were taught to be afraid of nuclear war (as they perhaps should’ve been).
A handful of others in the party room joined in to call for more school chaplains.
“There are new schools in growth areas that get no funding. We should continue to grow the chaplaincy program,” Assistant Youth Minister Luke Howarth later told The Guardian.
“I personally think, as assistant minister, that the language around climate change […] is alarmist and does cause mental health problems for young people – that’s a big concern.”
The school chaplaincy program, which gives around $20,000 each to 3,100 different schools, kicked off under the government of John Howard and has remained ever since. It was later resdesigned as one of Tony Abbott‘s signature policies, which says it all, really.
Heaps of people argue that this money would be better spent on school counsellors who were actually qualified and secular.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that there were some voices of reason in the party room who pointed out that a chaplain would likely make things worse for a young person wanting to open up about their sexuality, for example.
We could even take their initial argument a step further and say that the money would be better spent actually combating climate change, which would surely do wonders for everyone’s mental and physical health, rather than trying to make people feel better about our rapid destruction of the environment.
But that would mean these Liberal MP would need to genuinely care about climate change rather than just using it as a political handball.
