Anjali Sharma didn’t set out to become one of Australia’s most recognised youth climate voices. She saw a sponsored Instagram ad for a school strike organising meeting and showed up having memorised every climate statistic she could find.
Two years later she was a lead applicant in a landmark Federal Court case against the Federal Environment Minister arguing for a duty of care to young people.
That trajectory, from nervous first-timer to courtroom litigant to parliamentary advocate, is the subject of the second episode of There Will Be Dancing, the new podcast from Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia (WELA) in partnership with Women’s Agenda.
Sharma migrated to Australia from India at ten months old. 22 years later, she has led school strike movements, run Senate submission workshops for young people, brought 26 youth advocates to Parliament House and helped draft legislation currently before both federal and state governments.
The injustice that drives her is personal.
While Australia experiences heatwaves followed by cool changes, her family in India routinely endures days in the high 40s. In her birth city, temperatures reached 53 degrees Celsius for three consecutive days just last year. “If I have so much space, so much visibility to speak up for the people who are living through this day by day,” she says, “then of course I have to use that.”
That visibility has come at a cost. At 16, fronting a Federal Court case and writing op-eds, the backlash Sharma received had little to do with climate policy. The attacks were racialised, comments telling her to advocate for India, questioning her right to speak, escalating to calls for her deportation. While her gender, age and background have all been weaponised against her, her response has been to reframe each as a source of authority. “I deserve a seat at the table because I am a young person. I have a unique perspective on the world that comes from these specific identity factors.”
She has not navigated that path alone. Sister Bridget, a nun who had spent her life advocating for refugees, became the litigation guardian for the duty of care case — lending decades of hard-won legal and moral authority to a group of teenagers taking on the Federal Government. For Sharma, that relationship is emblematic of something the climate movement needs more of: older advocates choosing to place their experience in service of younger ones. “She speaks so well about what she was able to enjoy,” Sharma says, “and what she wants young people to come to enjoy.”
Sharma’s youth also makes the question of social media much more pointed. She found her way into climate activism through a sponsored Instagram ad while her duty of care campaign reaches young people through Instagram stories. Restricting where and how young people access political information doesn’t just limit their activism — it limits their ability to connect the dots between the issues shaping their lives.
For Sharma, those issues are interconnected: climate change drives up the cost of living, worsens the housing crisis and compounds every other crisis a young person is already navigating. Pull one thread and you’re contributing to the whole tapestry.
It is a tension that sits at the heart of her broader argument about intergenerational justice. Parliament was not built for people her age. Senate committees rarely hear from young panels. The intergenerational dimension of budget reporting has only just been introduced. “These parts are being carved out before my very eyes,” she says. “And they shouldn’t be.”
Listen to the full conversation with Anjali Sharma on There Will Be Dancing, available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all major podcast platforms.