After a tumultuous parliament week of Paris Climate deal withdrawals in the US, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull decided to visit Bondi Public School last week. Mr Turnbull most likely went in expecting to laugh off a few innocent questions about being Prime Minister and his favourite restaurant in Point Piper. Instead, he received the grilling of his life from questions about the Adani Coalmine and The Great Barrier Reef, to the pressing issue of Singapore’s sea snake problem.
Mr. Turnbull’s Facebook page posted the live video of the school visit, and wow, is it a rollercoaster. Turnbull is barely able to sit down before one child with aspirations of visiting Port Douglas asks “what are you going to do to save the Great Barrier Reef?” Immediately, in one of the most gloriously awkward moments ever, Turnbull suddenly finds himself conflicted between answering the question and keeping the kids awake.
“See, what happens is when farmers have their fields and they grow their crops and they have their animals grazing, they’ll be using fertilisers and chemicals and so forth on those fields, and when it rains that can run off, wash down onto the reef”, Turnbull begins to explain. He then continues: “so one of the important things…is that you don’t get water washing off agricultural fields onto the reef”.
Amazingly, the children don’t appear to all that interested in the intricacies of agricultural runoff into the reef, with some eyes already beginning to dart around in distraction.
The next question doesn’t help. “Are you getting rid of that mine that was putting all of that waste into the great barrier reef and near it?” another young student asks, seemingly in reference to the Adani coalmine. Turnbull then answers as though the child was secretly Tony Jones in disguise looking to embarrass him in front of a Q and A audience, “I’m not sure what one you’re talking about” he says, arms crossed. Then, in easily the greatest moment of the whole video, Mr. Turnbull stands up, walks towards the whiteboard and asks the children, “Do you want me to show you how water moves through the landscape?”.
Whether the kids even knew what the word “agriculture” means doesn’t seem to bother Mr. Turnbull, who pulls out a marker and begins to lecture the students on the intricacies of agricultural runoff, what a “swale” is (fucked if we know) and the dangers of fertiliser and manure being washed into the water. As everyone knows, if there’s one thing kids who haven’t even got their pen license care about, it’s the land-clearing techniques of reef farmers and agricultural runoff. All this, and poor Malcolm didn’t even answer the original question about the Adani coalmine.
The interview from here, much like Scott Birmingham’s ears, just gets weird. One child, who is woke af about the worlds crises, presses the Prime Minister on what he plans to do about Singapore reef “because it's got lots of sea snakes”. His environmental royal commission finally over, Turnbull sits down in relief and enjoys the weird questions of children in, we can’t lie, a funny and warm way. After explaining his plan to assist Singapore’s sea snake crisis, Turnbull then explains to a child that asks, “are you still in charge of Tasmania because it’s not attached to the mainland?” that he indeed is still the leader of Tasmania as well.
Only in the last moments of the visit does Turnbull do the teacher's job and put the children back to sleep, telling a long-winded story about the school’s establishment, and musing that “it’s an old school but it’s got a recent history which is really exciting”. What that statement means we will never know, but we don’t think this strange visit from the Prime Minister will start interesting Bondi Public School kids into livestreaming parliament anytime soon. Still, it's not the worst visit an Australian Prime Ministers had to a school, as this video of Tony Abbott being absolutely savaged by high school still holds that title:
