Just a couple of months shy of 50 years ago, along with other students, I produced an anti-Vietnam war poster that urged high-school students to join the Student Underground Movement.

As my first piece of street art it was hardly earth-shattering but was a tiny part of something that contributed, by May 1970, to a major student strike in which thousands of high-school students in Sydney and Melbourne took to the streets to protest the war in the lead-up to the moratoriums of that year.

It was a distant war insofar as it was in an obscure part of south-east Asia, but one with immediate consequences for those high-school students. If nothing else, some students — or their brothers — faced conscription and potential death on the Mekong Delta or the jungles of Nui Dat; let alone complicity in a colonial war that was leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

An anti-Vietnam War poster done by Chips Mackinolty in 1969 urging students to join the anti-war movement. It is now in the National Gallery of Australia collection Photograph: Chips Mackinolty

A response of Liberal-Country party governments at the time was to suspend students who participated in anti-Vietnam war activities. Indeed, the then Victorian premier, Henry Bolte, threatened to expel students and prevent them from completing their high-school certificates. I was lucky in New South Wales, only being suspended for two days for daring to display a Vietnam moratorium sticker on my school bag — others were suspended for longer or indeed expelled.

And so the response to recent high-school activism over climate change by the prime minister, Scott Morrison, has an uncanny echo five decades on.

There’s a different set of initials now: LNP. But the message is the same. High-school students should shut up, knuckle down, and stay away from the real world of political discussion – in this case the issue of climate change and campaigns to shift government action/inaction on the issue.

We shouldn’t be listening to young people who nevertheless will have to bear the consequences of climate change – that “listening” is bitterly opposed by our prime minister.

He told parliament they should stay in the classroom rather than thinking about things that “can be dealt with outside of school”.

Really?

“Each day I send my kids to school and I know other members’ kids should also go to school but we do not support our schools being turned into parliaments,” Morrison said in parliament.

“What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools.

“We are committed to all of these things [climate change action] but I will tell you what we are also committed to — kids should go to school.”

Learning? Activism? Going to school?

You don’t get it, prime minister. Your government urges young people to take up Stem subjects — yet rejects them out of hand when they take those learnings into life in confronting climate change.

Perhaps it is the politicians that should go back to school and do a bit of learning.

And all power to those high-school students who will be putting their hands up on climate change. History is on your side.