On a stinking hot November day, seven years ago, Grace Vegesana and a handful of other young climate activists set up a small stage in a large square in Sydney’s CBD – and waited. Inspired by the first school striker for climate,Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, the high school students decided to organise their own rally.
Vegesana expected a hundred people to show up. Five thousand came. “It was like, oh my God, we’ve unleashed some kind of beast, people want more,” she recalls. In the months afterwardscrowds doubled and then tripled.
A year later, the devastation of Australia’sblack summer bushfirescollided with a conservative government that was perceived to be failing to act.It was, as Vegesana says, “a tinderbox of fury”, which on 20 September 2019 was set alight: An estimated 300,000 people attended hundreds of rallies across Australia in what were probably the largest public demonstrations since the marches against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“It was this exhilarating moment of feeling so swept up in social change, of feeling undefeatable,” says Vegesana, now the director of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, which helps coordinate climate groups across the country.
At the time, organisers saw that day as a launchpad to even larger rallies. Activists hoped to see the biggest protests in the country’s history. Instead, it was the movement’s peak, to date.
Inside AYCC’s office in Sydney, photos of those strikes hang as a reminder of unrealised potential.A Lowy Institute poll found concern over the climate crisis among Australians aged 18-29 peaked in 2019, falling eight percentage points by last year. The movement that thousands of young people had hoped might change their future has, on the face of it, petered out.
So, where did the momentum go?
The first blow was the pandemic. Lockdowns forced the school strike movement online preventing the handing of the torch to the next year level. Organisers tried to pivot online, but tens of thousands of supporters were lost in the process.Isabelle Zhu-Maguire, a 25-year-old PhD student who was heavily involved in the youth movement, says the online actions they could take – emailing representatives, creating online petitions and organising digital meet-ups – felt less politically powerful.
The pandemic compounded competing social issues and geopolitical unrest, which has left young activists exhausted, according to Dr Eve Mayes, a researcher of student activism at Deakin University.
When Australia finally emerged from lockdowns, the size of climate protests paled in comparison with their 2019 peak. Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a failed Indigenous voice to parliament referendum, Israel’s war in Gaza and Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office, allvying for attention. “It’s very emotionally draining for young people to be fighting for a range of issues long-term,” Mayes says.
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The Lowy Institute’s director of public opinion and foreign policy, Ryan Neelam, says people’s attention is “much more fragmented and divided” now than at any time he can remember. “That’s likely had a drag on public views on climate change.”
The sense among young people that fighting together could bring about meaningful social change, is being challenged by the idea that no matter what you do,the world’s litany of problems are insurmountable, AYCC’s national campaigner, 20-year-old Natasha Abhayawickrama, says.
Last week, polling commissioned by AYCC and Solutions for Climate Australia found that while climate action is an “important” factor for the majority of 18 to 29-year-olds in deciding their vote in thefederal election, just 8% labelled climate and the environment as their greatest concern. Instead, the biggest issue among Gen Z was the cost of living (44%).
According to a 2024 population-wideIpsos poll, the perceived power of Australian society to influence the climate crisis has also declined in recent years. The majority of Australians support the transition to clean energy, but 59% now want to see energy prices prioritised over other factors including avoiding environmental harm, it found.
“You can’t go out and strike after every single natural disaster,” Abhayawickrama says. “This is the world we’re living in now, we are forced to focus on meeting our current material needs.
“Young people are more disillusioned and apathetic than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Vegesana says.
The lull in climate marches may have also been compounded by theintensification of anti-protest lawstargeted at direct-action environment groups, Mayes says. “Whether its parents or organisers, there’s a greater sense of caution around protest … about putting young people in those situations.”
In AYCC’s office, a small space in a renovated warehouse in Sydney’s inner-city, a dim buzz fills the room.
Vegesana and three other activists from a handful of climate groups hunch over laptops as they busily craft campaigns to push climate action on to the agenda as the election approaches.
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An activist from Rising Tide,a group known for its canoe blockades of Newcastle’s coal port, hastily cuts up footage from a Labor campaign press conference held earlier that day. Across from him an AYCC staff member produces short-form videos for the organisation’s TikTok account, which are part of its campaign to encourage young people to vote.
While social media is a powerful tool for the movement to spread their message and bring together disparate communities of like-minded people, Vegesana says it also can cause harm by fracturing audiences and discouraging collective action.
Zhu-Maguire agrees.“One of the successes of school strikes was the way in which everyone got around it, it was a unifying moment,” she says. “Now, without it, I see so many start-ups, social entrepreneurs, it’s just not the collective action required to create any type of public pressure.”
It’s a quiet autumn day at the University of Sydney as a 19-year-old student, Kayla Hill, strolls out of a lecture on nature, culture and power. She joined the school strike movement in early 2019 and soon found herself outside Kirribilli House bellowing chants down a megaphone as she completed high school. But in 2023, feeling exhausted and working under a new government that sapped energy from the movement, she walked away from organising.
A year earlier Anthony Albanese’s Labor government was voted in with amandate for climate action. Until then, the movement had had a central villain: then prime minister Scott Morrison, the man who famously wielded a lump of coal during a speech in parliament andurged students to be “less activist”.
Some in the youth movement saw Labor’s victory as a result of their hard work, others wanted to keep fighting as the governmentapproved dozens of coal and gas mine expansions. “There was a hesitancy to criticise Labor and the inadequacy of their climate policy,” Hill says. “A lot of people became really uncertain as to how to go about continuing to fight.”
The school strike movement stumbled, splintered and then disintegrated. AYCC took a hit too. The flow of philanthropic and small donations, by which the group is solely funded, dropped by about one-third after the election, Vegesana says.
Butwhile the youth movement has declined sharply, Mayes argues it has, in part, changed form as activists mobilise around intersecting issues with the same “root causes”. Last month, a youth activist group, the Tomorrow Movement, placed toilets outside MPs’ offices in a stunt accusing the government of “flushing our future down the toilet” over failure to act on climate change and housing affordability.
Amanda Tattersall, an associate professor in urban geography at the University of Sydney, agrees. The decline of civic participation since the 1980s has made it harder for social movements to gain traction, she says, but it’s a mistake to think that mass mobilisation, like that seen in 2019, is the only form of social change.
“Social movements have always ebbed and flowed, it’s what leadership and democratic capacity stays behind and takes form in the next movement, that’s going to be the legacy of school strike,” Tattersall says. School strikers got a crash course in how to build momentum and bring about change – skills which will stay with them.
The original group of school strikers are now in their 20s. Some fight in newly formed climate groups, others have shifted causes.
Many have entered the workforce. “We’re in government departments or the private sector, contributing to policy, we’re still advocating for change,” says 24-year-old Lincoln Ingravalle, a climate ambassador for Unicef who works for an energy retailer in Melbourne. “There is fatigue, but the momentum is still there, it’s just not as visible.”
In Canberra, Zhu-Maguirenow helps convene a coalition of local climate action groups. “I don’t fully mourn those days of young people mobilising, because I don’t think they’re completely gone,” she says.
“Those moments were completely shaping for a generation of people, I don’t know how you could let go of that.”