Climate Activism Is Now Established In Australian classrooms
It’s great that after just five years’ operation, a government-backed non-profit service to teachers is lifting the effectiveness of teachers’ classroom work
But, and it’s a big ‘but’, the Impact Teaching Group is already infected by leftists’ outlook on the world.[1]
I’ve accessed content that is not just fashionably ‘green’ but foolish and inaccurate.
I’ve also found 1-minute “Acknowledgements of Country” affixed to the start of Impact lessons about Aborigines. The teacher’s instruction is:
“As a sign of respect, please take a moment to deliver an Acknowledgement of Country” (p18).
The lesson schedule explicitly allocates:
“Acknowledgement of Country – 1 min” when the lesson contains material concerning ‘First Nations peoples and/or Country’.
It’s like forcing kids to sing the national anthem before a civics lesson, or to chant “Grace” before lunch break. These Impact lessons also gee-up kids to root for treaties and do guilt trips about colonialism.
I’m actually sad about these fallings-off because Impact’s orthodox body of work looks so promising. It’s exceptional and not the rule to find Impact encouraging kids to activism.
[For northern hemisphere readers I’ve omitted my copious take-down of Impact’s material on Aborigines in order to focus on Impact’s climate material].
Education researchers say that it takes close to 20 years to move from evidence-proved good teaching theory to established teaching practice. If Impact is the real deal, schools can now start to claw their way back from their long decline – the PISA international ratings show our 15yo’s proficiency in reading and maths has eroded by about two years’ worth of schooling since the early 2000s.
What’s Impact’s system? Its on-line learning kits (Foundation to Year 10) are based on simple step-by-step increases to get results without overloading kids’ immature brainpower.
Mercifully, a teacher doesn’t have to create all this from scratch. It’s like Henry Ford assembling cars the smart way from components. Impact has mobilised 700 teachers and experts who’ve created 11,000 free packs (at mid-2026) involving lessons, worksheets, quizzes, slides, videos and tests.
The federal-state quango called the Australian Education Resource Organisation (AERO) helped create Impact and mentors it. AERO collates research-proven best practices here and overseas, then gets the top systems out into classrooms through Impact’s prefabricated lessons.
The Impact delivery of on-line education contrasts with several long-standing free systems. These are ABC Education, the federal-state “Scootle” (encyclopaedia-style material of abysmal quality and relevance[2]); the Human Rights Commission and Amnesty’s shockingly-political lessons; and Cool.org, the stamping ground of ‘green’-left educationists.
Cool bulks as large as Impact. Its raison d’etre has never been secret. It’s to turn kids into horrid little activists and school-strikers preaching ‘net-zero’ myths and Aboriginal romance to principals, parents, shire councillors and especially voters.[3]
Impact and Cool jointly dominate third-party access to classrooms. Both claim reach into 95 percent of schools, and teacher sign-ons of 170,000-plus (Impact) and 175,000-plus (Cool).
Cool claims 2.5m kids taught annually; Impact doesn’t give a figure. Impact, however, has taken only five years to reach school client tallies approaching Cool’s, that Cool recruited during 20 years.
Now for the sour news about Impact’s “progressive” slant. To be fair, the government-mandated curriculum is itself wretchedly “progressive” and it’s hard to disentangle Impact’s slants from the governments’.
RENEWABLES ‘GOOD’
Impact’s ‘renewables’ material blends ignorance and green talking-points into an atrocious muddle.
Impact gives 11 year-olds English composition exercises spread across ten lessons, including to compare the strengths and weaknesses of using ‘renewable’ energy sources “in preference to non-renewable sources”– a nicely-worded hint.
There is also supposed to be factual teaching – fat chance:
“In this lesson, we will learn about methods we use to gain energy from non-renewable sources such as coal, oil and gas.”
The kids’ essays have to be “persuasive”. The supplied comparisons are outrageously biased towards ‘renewables’, almost beyond satire but no joking matter for the mining industry and half the country’s parents.
The supplied video is by Amanda Barrett, “she/her” – children’s literacy specialist who has a Bachelor in Communications (Marketing & Advertising) from Monash and Grad/Dip Education (RMIT).
What is she doing unleashing economic idiosyncracy into regular classrooms? She expects the kids to regurgitate all her dubious talking points, including:
‘Mining can destroy the environment … and finally, mining is dangerous.’
Barrett explains that coal has been going strong since 1880s,
“and you might be wondering then what’s the big deal? Like why is coal so bad? Let’s find out.”
[The “big deal” is actually that coal-power liberated humanity, including Ms Barrett, from squalor, back-breaking toil and early death].
She continues that coal when mined takes millions of years to replace (but why would anyone bother?), and that coal cooks the planet:
“Mining for coal can also cause the ground to cave in and make underground fires that burn for decades at a time, polluting the atmosphere. Don’t forget to take notes.”
Barrett doesn’t mention that until zealots in government sabotaged coal-fired power, Australia for half a century had such low-cost and reliable electricity that it wasn’t even a conversation piece.[6]
She continues:
“Oil is cheap and reliable like coal. But the problem is that once we use up all of the oil in the world, we don’t have any more.”
In 1974 before she was born, I was in the Canberra Press Gallery and heard Labor’s Energy Minister Rex Connor swear that all Australia’s oil would be used up by 1984. The crude-oil production last fiscal year (including condensate) was 90 million barrels.
As for gas, Australia’s sitting on vast amounts that Labor and its ‘green’-tape won’t let us extract. And Victoria has enough brown coal to power my state cheaply for hundreds more years.
Barrett states:
“When mining for oil, if there’s a problem with the drilling or machinery, the oil can explode out of the well and spill into the ocean or surrounding land, killing sea and wildlife. So that’s a really big problem with oil mining as well. So like coal, when the byproducts of oil are burned, they also release carbon dioxide into the air and they contribute to global warming.
Reminder to Ms Barrett’s pupils: the world runs on oil, regardless of her phobias about explosions and spills. And without mineral exports Australia would be Paul Keating’s banana republic – or worse.
Just observe Prime Minister Albanese begging overseas for oil and diesel to keep us going. And somehow Impact’s lesson forgets to mention that wind turbines kill bats, hawks and eagles and have devastated Queensland’s pristine forest ranges.
Barrett:
Our third fossil fuel is natural gas. Mining for natural gas can cause environmental problems. Fracturing rocks cause mini-earthquakes, and gas leaks can contaminate water sources making people sick and animals sick. Like oil, natural gas is expected to run out in the next 100 years, which is not very good.”
[Oh for heaven’s sake, Amanda! The world’s tankers are hastening to USA ports to buy America’s fracked gas. It’s been safely extracted there for 20 years, in volumes that have increased nearly 20-fold]
On nuclear power, she shows pics of the cooling towers. Unlike their ABC, she has the decency to mention that they’re emitting steam, not ‘dirty’ plumes of CO2.
Barrett burbles on:
Uranium is a non-renewable resource. The other issues with nuclear energy is that nuclear power is difficult to harvest and nuclear power plants are very complicated to run.
Maybe Amanda personally would find the plants ‘very complicated’ to run, but engineers have produced this ‘very complicated’ nuclear power for France for the past half century.
And why doesn’t she describe windpower as “difficult to harvest” – especially when there’s no wind – via its thousands of kilometres of high-voltage transmission lines across farmland?
Nuclear energy also produces a radioactive material that can be extremely toxic to people and the environment. If something goes wrong with a nuclear power plant it can affect the environment around it for hundreds of years.
Sure, Russian incompetence caused the Chernobyl disaster. The Fukushima blow-up was from both an earthquake and tsunami, but not one person died from radiation.
Nuclear power today generates nine percent of the world’s electricity, and in half a century there’s been no contamination from transport and storage of nuclear waste.[7]
She lists some plus factors of ‘fossil fuels’, namely “Locating fossil fuels is quite easy.[What!? Ask a geologist.] They generate large amounts of energy quite cheaply.” Then she moves on to ‘renewables’:
“Solar energy is good because it’s cheap to run [except when the sun sets]. Solar energy is good but it uses toxic substances to make the panels which are bad for the environment. And finally, solar energy is good, so we [she means the Chinese] need to find a way to make the panels without damaging the environment… Renewable energy sources don’t run out. They’re constantly able to be replenished, which is fantastic.”
In the real world, panels and turbines wear out in a decade or two. The blades, concrete, plastics and toxic scrap have to be disposed of and the whole cycle repeated, which is not so ‘fantastic’ for the environment.
If Barrett’s lesson typifies what Australian schoolkids are taught, we’ll be in big trouble when such kids grow up to become activist politicians.
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Some bold emphasis added