Quote:Contributed by Gary Duffy - Ipswich Mayor Candidate 2020
How many of these kids are wearing hand-me-down clothes from their older sibling?
How many have the same phone that they had last year?
How many of them polish their shoes and look after them and have taken their shoes to be repaired instead of buying new every 6 mths?
How many of them have a solar charger for their Phone?
How many of them walked to school?
I bet none, they all want new clothes, new phones, new shoes, and their parents have to yell at them to get up and get to school and they will not go to school unless their parents take them.
All the Electronics that they buy, the playstations the games in their fancy packaging, the fancy gadget that they sit spinning between their fingers, the Gel they put in their hair, it is all manufactured using electricity and it is all discarded into landfill or into Garbage Incinerators to further pollute the planet.
You all want the latest and newest fancy hairstyle with sprays, gels and special shampoos, conditioners, your parent's generation were happy with short-back-and-sides or just let it grow long and cut it yourself and wash it with a cake of soap.
Your parents got in and had a shower in under 3 minutes, today's kids take 30minutes of hot showers burning through electricity and water like it was free. This all uses energy to provide you this.
Your parents only had take-a-way on special occasions. Take away packaging is the most manufactured and discarded packaging in the world. in 2017 74,000 B-Double semi-trailer loads of compacted fast food packaging garbage was dumped or burnt in toxic incinerators, almost none of it was recycled.
Australians pay 51.5 million visits to fast food restaurants every month, 60 percent of these not surprisingly, are young people, aged between 14 and 29.
Repeat - it is not your parents that are the problem, it is the youth of today that are the problem.
Kids of today, want NEW everything every year, made in sweatshops in China or India where they have the most toxic and environmentally damaging Garbage to Energy plants burning the clothes, shoes, phones, gadgets etc; they wore or had last year.
Every time you buy a phone there has to be Platinum mined. Last year 76 people died mining Platinum in South Africa just so greedy kids can have a new phone every year.
Kids, DO NOT ACCUSE YOUR PARENTS or parliamentarians of destroying the planet, IF it is being destroyed, it is because of your greedy consumerism.
If you want climate action, do not buy anything or get your parents to buy you anything new except for books for the next 18 Months.
It is not the greedy pigs of parliament, it is the greedy kids of today.
I wonder how many of the over 18yo kids that marched signed the Parliamentary petition to stop the toxic Incinerator being built at Swanbank?