Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi told school children on Wednesday to make a big sign and have fun, and on Thursday thousands of them walked out of class in 8 cities to protest against Pauline Hanson, with most of them too young to vote.

The day is running under the banner "Students Say No to Hanson" and was called by the National Union of Students, which wanted about 10,000 students on the street. Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth and Canberra all met at 1pm, with Wollongong at 1.30pm, Melbourne at 2pm and Newcastle at 5pm.

Image: Event promotional poster titled "Students Say No To Hanson – Nationwide Day of Protest" (August 13). While student activists rallied around the message, figures like Pauline Hanson and Coalition MPs criticized the movement, arguing schools should focus on academics rather than political activism.

Ms Faruqi posted a video on Wednesday aimed at students she said were asking her permission to leave school for the protest, and her answer to them was of course, followed by hope you have made a big sign and a sign off of have fun.

The post was captioned "Power to the students", and Liberal senator Alex Antic answered it by pointing at the adults rather than the children.

"Why are kids protesting things that they don't really, I think, have a proper grasp of?" Mr Antic told News24, before asking "why are they being encouraged to do it by adults?"

He said protests like this only ever run one way, listing immigration, COVID 19 and freedom protests as causes that never seem to produce a walkout, calling it a very worrying trend for the state of the political minds of our kids.

The organisers say missing school is a fair trade

Yasmine Johnson, the National Union of Students education officer running the walkout, was asked whether students would be worse off for missing an afternoon of class, answering that students miss school for lots of reasons, some of which are far less important than protesting.

Students for Palestine: Yasmine Johnson announces the nationwide walkout

Barnaby Joyce, the One Nation MP, said none of it came from the students themselves. "Do you honestly believe that 3 weeks ago those children of their own volition were saying: 'I think I'm going to have a political protest against a political party?'" he said. "No, they just wanted to go to school and play soccer with their mates." He said left wing teachers were using the kids as a prop, and that is very wrong.

A University of Sydney student, Ethan Floyd, weighed a student missing a day of school against One Nation's immigration policy, saying that is a pretty easy algorithm for me to do, and I dropped math in year 10.

Most of the students who walked out are not old enough to vote

The voting age in Australia is 18, so most high school students in the crowd cannot vote in any election and will not be able to for years.

Education Minister Jason Clare did not want them there either. "I get it that people don't like One Nation, I don't like One Nation either," he told a press conference on Wednesday, before telling students that if people want to protest on the weekend, then fill your boots, but I want you at school when school is on, learning.

None of the education ministers who've been asked has said a student will be marked absent for going. One News reported on 5 August that South Australia's Lucy Hood left the decision to parents and that Victoria's Department of Education wouldn't say what would happen, and neither has moved since.

None of the 6 speakers at the Sydney rally were a school student

The organisers published their Sydney speaking list on Instagram with 1 card for each speaker, and every 1 of the 6 is a university student union office bearer, a university staff union activist or a candidate for the next New South Wales election.

Shovan Bhattarai, the vice president of the University of Sydney Students' Representative Council, is the NSW Socialists candidate for Newtown at the state election on 13 March 2027. Alma Torlakovic is not a student at all but an activist in the National Tertiary Education Union, which covers university staff, and she is running for Granville at the same election.

The listed chair, Emma Searle, is another council office bearer whose campus paper Honi Soit records her faction as Socialist Alternative, and the council's general secretary, Ava Cavalerie, is Labor. The remaining two speakers are the council's ethnocultural officer, Imane Lattab, and Jill McInnes, described by the organisers as an Indigenous socialist activist in the same staff union.

The school students standing in front of them will still be too young to vote in the election 2 of the speakers are contesting.

Ms Johnson has denied that teachers had anything to do with organising the day, and her denial didn't extend to her own party. One News reported on 5 August that she's a member of Socialist Alternative, that the group's annual conference in April ran sessions on resisting One Nation and on meeting its high school wing, and that its newspaper Red Flag set out the aim of recruiting people into a larger socialist movement.

The wider argument about what children are actually taught was set out this year by Dr Bella d'Abrera of the Institute of Public Affairs in her book Mindless, which argues that schools in Australia, Britain and the United States now teach victimhood and identity politics in place of knowledge while literacy and numeracy standards fall. An audit of teaching degrees at Australian universities by the same organisation in 2023 found that a 4 year Bachelor of Education devotes the equivalent of 10 weeks of classes to core literacy and numeracy, that fewer than 1 in 10 teaching subjects cover those skills, and that nearly a third of them relate to what it called “woke concepts and ideology”.

Pauline Hanson told them to protest their parents' wages

Ms Hanson answered at 7:59am on Thursday, before a single student had left a classroom.

"Schools should teach young Australians how to think, not what to think. If you want to protest something, protest why your parents' wages are going backwards and the cost of everything is going up. The Labor Greens government is selling out your future, and you'll inherit a weaker, poorer and less safe country. Whether you know it or not, One Nation and I are fighting for you."

An hour later she posted a video response to the protests, having already promised that under One Nation schools would teach patriotism and drop Welcome to Country.

Lee Hanson, who's expected to run for the Senate in Tasmania, said schools "should be places for education, critical thinking and respectful debate, not breeding grounds for political activism or ideological indoctrination", and that young Australians should be encouraged to "question ideas and make up their own minds".

The chant the crowds have used at One Nation events all year, and which the ABC recorded in Perth in June, is “Pauline Hanson go to hell, take your racists there as well”, alongside “migrants are welcome, racists are not”. Green Left, which backs the walkout, posted at 1:07pm on Thursday that large numbers of high school students were gathering at Sydney's Town Hall square.

James Paterson says this only feeds One Nation

Liberal senator James Paterson said the people campaigning against Ms Hanson keep handing her the advantage.

"I think One Nation probably weaponised this quite successfully, and they like to claim victimhood status whenever they're criticised. All they're doing is feeding One Nation and their grievances. People should reflect on that if they're really genuinely opposed to One Nation's political success. They should reflect on how they've contributed to it."

News24's Pulse poll with YouGov this week put One Nation on 24% of the primary vote, up from about 6% at the 2025 federal election, ahead of the Coalition on 22% and behind Labor on 28%. Ms Searle wrote in Honi Soit this week that One Nation now has 70,000 paid members, more than any other party in the country.

Red Flag told its readers in June that the 1998 student walkouts were the model to copy, because they pushed the Liberals into a preference deal meant to destroy One Nation. The organisers wanted 10,000 students on the street on Thursday.