Jackie French AM

“Children have the right to a clean and safe environment.”

When I was a kid on the outskirts of Brisbane the gutters ran with green slime down the creek, carrying all the household waste water from the new post war development. The dunny men came once a week, accompanied by 1,000 flies, to carry out the ‘dunny’ pan. At school we practiced hiding under the desks if the siren rang to tell us the Soviets had dropped a nuclear bomb.

The bomb never arrived, but polio did – killing or maiming a kid in about one in three households in our street. I lost my hearing temporarily from measles. Our school was periodically shut for the whooping cough epidemic. My brother suffered the long-term side effects for years.

Canberra’s gutters don’t grow green slime. The water that comes out of our taps is clear and chlorinated. Vaccines have eliminated the most common fatal diseases for our young people. The dangers that face our kids are less visible, and easier to ignore.

A recent study discovered that almost 1% of recently autopsied brain matter was microplastics from the omnipresent fragments in the air – present in our food, our air, that clean water from the tap. How does that microplastic harm us? We don’t know. It’s as if we’ve had a tabby cat living on our sofa and have just discovered he’s a sabretooth tiger.

The number of kids with ‘long covid’ grows each year. Dangerously ill kids wait for hours in hospital emergency, to be seen and dismissed by exhausted professionals. If the family grieves in silence, no one knows.

Newly arrived European wasp colonies are growing to enormous sizes in the warmer climate than their native Europe. Here they can attack in large enough numbers to kill a child.

As I write this a gale is howling, as it did during the 2029-2020 bushfires, and yet we are even less prepared, as exhausted volunteers can no longer cope with the months of unpaid work or following the poor decisions of bureaucrats far away. Despite record floods, Councils are still giving permission for developments on land that was underwater in the 1970’s – perhaps the “sabretooth tiger” is even below sea level? If the sand banks are washed away by the ever more powerful storms, tens of square km may be ocean.

These days the dangers are mostly invisible. We shut our eyes to the dangers for our kids. Tomorrow will be like today…and then, one day, it isn’t.

We are victims of ‘a new kind of second sight’. Glimpse the danger, then forget it, thinking ‘there is nothing we can do.’

Yet every problem I’ve outlined has possible solutions – if we have an educated population. One in three kids don’t reach target literacy; one in five can hardly read at all. Kids’ education is going backwards…and in Canberra, we are planning a billion-dollar stadium.

I hope we do get a stadium. But perhaps it’s time to make five lists: the dangers our kids face, the money spent to protect them, the money spent on children’s physical and mental health, kids’ literacy and scientific and technological education, on conflict resolution to keep us out of wars – and compare it with the money spent on other things. Which of those things are we prepared to do without to keep our kids safe?

I challenge every government to have the courage to make those lists public. It won’t be popular. But looking openly at priorities is the only way to protect our children and our childrens’ children.

There is no greater human duty than to keep our kids safe.