Facebook is something I try not to open. It’s not only a jarring reminder of mortality, with spectres from my childhood popping up looking distinctly greyer – Facebook lays bare the ideological rot that has taken hold of my peers.

The Teals are ‘my people’ – geographically speaking.

I’m a North Shore girl, born and bred, brought up in a blue-ribbon Liberal suburb, and educated at a conservative private school (albeit as a peasant with very hard-working parents).

You would have struggled to find a single Labor-voting parent amongst the student body, with the vast majority religiously voting for Howard’s brand of ‘broad church’ Liberal to keep the economy strong after the nightmare years of Keating and his interest rates.

These parents and their offspring have since morphed into the Teals.

Teal is, after all, what happens if you mix blue and green together – no doubt a deliberate visual cue organised by the movement’s architect who was trying to imply that the Teals are nothing more than ‘nature-loving Liberals’.

From a logical perspective, this is preposterous. A sober look at the Teals reveals them to be a corporate-interest entity dressed up in Green-ideology whose primary function revolves around using legislation to erase traditional energy market competition. This allows renewable billionaires and mining giants to grow their wealth under the delusion of ‘apocalypse’.

It’s essentially a marketing campaign for a bad product.

This is not something well-educated people typically get caught up in, so why did faithful conservatives betray their core values?

Third-wave feminism.

Whilst at school, we were bombarded with the message that we were destined to ‘change the world’. We were ‘powerful’ and ‘special’. Indeed, nearly every school speech and sermon served this purpose. If you didn’t want to ‘change the world’ you were cast out as lacking ambition or a moral failure. Heaven help you if your goal in life was simply to work hard and provide for your family…

The Christian faith was used to manipulate the girls into associating political ambitions with loyalty to the church. If you are wondering how religion got itself tangled up in Marxism, this is where it began – with soft ties to globalism and environmentalism.

During junior school, saving the world was originally branded as standard charity work. We were forced to do relatively harmless things like raising money to feed children in Africa or selling pins to support cancer research. We improved the local environment via Clean Up Australia Day (which may be one of the only worthwhile environmental causes in decades), and developed skills as a ‘global citizen’.

‘Global citizen’ is where it started to go wrong.

As we progressed through senior school, the political conversation changed. We were told that borders were ‘evil’ and that all cultures were of equal merit. Charity was giving way to the fringes of left-wing activism.

Climate ideology filtered into North Shore private schools as a ‘save the planet’ singular ambition. The starving African children were forgotten. Now it was all about how to be a ‘powerful female global citizen fighting against climate change’ by – uh… Well, to tell you the truth, they rarely elaborated on how that might work. It was a declaration, not a discussion.

This shift was demonstrated by the renaming of school subjects. I had chosen geology, because I loved rocks and volcanoes. A few months into the course, the curriculum changed and it was re-named Earth and Environmental Sciences with conspicuously thinner textbooks. Suddenly I found myself in a rising tide of fear-mongering, watching videos from the seventies that warned of a ‘catastrophic ice age’ in the next ten years. When we pointed out to our teacher that the course was meant to be about ‘catastrophic global warming’ and that we hadn’t died under an ice sheet, her reply was that it was ‘basically the same thing’.

No wonder they re-named it ‘Climate Change’.

By the time this generation of girls graduated as young women, they had been brainwashed into believing they absolutely had to change the world or – at the very least – embark on a career as powerful and independent women.

University posed little challenge to that mantra, with these women excelling. Upon leaving, most of the girls in my year went straight into their desired careers. They were training to be doctors, lawyers, vets, professional athletes, or some sort of miscellaneous over-achiever.

That was the last I heard of them for about ten years. I disappeared into the world of retail and AI databases while they – I presumed – were ‘changing the world’. When I opened Facebook later on, I was very surprised to find an entire generation of stay-at-home doctors’ wives and lawyers’ wives. My power-women peers had given up their last names and their careers sometime in their early thirties in favour of having children. Their husbands were, almost without exception, rich.

They had become North Shore parents, sending their kids to private schools while spending their days in mothers’ groups at local cafes and shopping centres.

To summarise… They were rich, not working, and certainly not ‘changing the world’ or ‘saving the planet’.

I believe this is the source of the ‘guilt’ that has been cleverly exploited by the Teals.

The Teals offered these women, who privately perceived themselves to be failures compared to the promise of their upbringing, a chance to redeem themselves – and all they had to do was vote. Like paying the local church to absolve their sins, these women could now claim to be virtuous saviours and activists literally saving the world. At the very least, it gave them something to brag about over a latte.

If this were only about their feelings, it would not matter, but their wealth insulates them from the dark side of Teal ideology.

Far from their childhood dreams of helping the poor – the origin of the school’s charity ethos – Teal disciples unwittingly impoverish the working classes in neighbouring suburbs via climate legislation. What’s worse, the Teal ideology is strong enough to excuse the financial suffering of those ‘carbon criminals’ who ‘deserve’ their poverty for bringing about the apocalypse.

A genuinely successful woman actually contributing something of value would never fall for the religious zealotry and cheap propaganda of a climate cult, but you have to understand the crucible of upper-class suburbia where purchasing a Tesla as the family’s third car elevates that mum to a god-like status among her peers.

Those that cannot afford the Tesla carpet their roof in solar panels or go out of their way to ‘offset their carbon footprint’ by pouring money into the pockets of billion-dollar corporations who pretend to plant trees on their behalf. Even the laziest North Shore mother can put an ‘I voted Teal’ picture on their Facebook page to make sure they stay in with the popular girls.

The Teal religion became the perfect way to dislodge wealthy conservative women and flip the seats. Labor certainly wasn’t going to manage, after all, what does the average North Shore mother have in common with the Union movement? As for the Greens, well… Even the most environmentally devout among them was smart enough to notice that the Green movement is unhinged from reality – hugging communists instead of trees with no regard to national security or a functioning economy. ‘Eat the Rich’ is not generally a slogan that the rich vote for.

But Teal?

It offers all the virtue of ‘saving the environment’ wrapped up with their deeply held need to fulfil their duty as ‘global leaders’, ‘crusaders’, and ‘saviours’.

What they haven’t worked out yet, by the grace of their inherited wealth built by decades of conservative government, is that they are the elite class persecuting the poor solely to satisfy their selfish need to ‘feel’ good.

These women latch onto any social movement that promises public adoration. Whether it’s their sudden ‘revelation’ that after 10 years of marriage and three children they’re ‘bisexual’ and have added a rainbow flag to their profile, or an ‘It’s Time!’ banner followed by a long rant about how the Liberals have to do something about the treatment of women in Parliament despite none of them setting foot in politics.

If you are wondering who in their right mind would take their toddler to see a man in fishnets reading them confusing, sexually-themed stories in a library – these are the mothers you’re looking for.

At the end of the day, this allows them to avoid the obvious reality: they are failures. At least, as far as their careers are concerned.

My childhood friends were sold the promise that they could ‘have it all’ when the reality is that every person finds meaning in life on a different path. If they had been raised properly to accept and value their choices, there would be no emotional hole to fill or pang of guilt to numb.

The Teals entered through the cracks left by an education system that raised women destined to break when confronted by the world.

We will all pay for this mistake … and their vanity.

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.