CHARLES WOOLEY

If the voting age is dropped to 16, free tertiary education could become a game-changing election issue like few before it

My son Jim turned 17 this week and he would love to vote at the next federal election but as things stand will be unlikely to have a say in who governs us until at least 2023 when he will be 22 years old.

The good news for him is Western Australian Greens senator Jordon SteeleJohn wants to lower the voting age from 18 years to 16 and recently introduced a bill to that end into Federal Parliament.

The senator sensibly reasoned that “it would show young people that we hear them, we care about their opinions and we are working for their future”. Labor, anticipating some electoral advantage, will support the legislation.

While it’s a fair bet that votes in the 16 to 18 year age group would represent a more idealistic cohort of new voters, it can’t be presumed anyone young and starry-eyed would necessarily consider Labor to be less cynical and self-serving than the other mob. What our kids have always heard from politically disillusioned parents is that both the major parties are equally undeserving. Both covertly agree on one thing, they share one abiding interest: self interest.

One party is a brass rubbing of the other as you have seen in their ruthless overthrow of elected prime ministers. Most kids are aware of this deviousness but democracy is such a fragile flower perhaps its survival is not much assisted by oldies slagging off to the kids about all the tragic shortcomings.

Must we stop telling them the truth? I’d really like them to know that democracy is a wonderful ideal and that it is sad the current generation of politicians fail to live up to it. We can only hope whenever the kids get the vote they will elect better people.

The last census in 2016 told us that the Australian population of 15 to 19 year olds numbered 1,421,595. The data comes in five year age groupings but a quick beer coaster calculation with the sharpest business brains at the Shipwrights Arms suggested about one million new voters would be created should this legislation be rushed through before the next federal election. It’s an election that looks odds-on to be a landslide to Labor. That would be a totally deserved defeat for the Government but equally a totally undeserved victory for the Opposition.

Could ScoMo work a miracle between then and now? No one much likes Bill Shorten (including the kids) but Jim and his college cohort would vote Green. Then despite the Shorten factor they would vote Labor second but only because there is some wishful thinking that Labor might abolish university fees.

For today’s teenagers tertiary education debt is a huge issue. If they were to get the vote, it might even be a game-changer.

I tell my kids things were worse when I was their age. You had to be 21 to vote even though males younger than that could be conscripted to fight in the disastrous war in Vietnam. The kids can scarcely believe me now that the selection method was a bizarre form of televised Tattslotto in which the numbers in the barrel were your birthdate. When your number was up, it was sometimes quite literally so. There were 521 young men who never came home. A further 3000 were wounded and an unknown number suffered lifelong psychological problems. The catastrophic and unwinnable conflict along with the political cowardice of conscripting disenfranchised young men for military service was so manifestly unfair that Gough Whitlam was swept into power in 1972.

But that’s all ancient history for my kids, so now if the present generation of teens should get the vote what will they vote for?

“No coal,” Jim tells me. He says the overwhelming bulk of world scientific opinion is convinced that increased carbon dioxide levels mean the planet is warming. So why do our politicians dither and vacillate if the bulk of science is so clear? “Money,” Jim tersely replies. The certitude of youth does not muck around and he is probably right.

So what about ScoMo? Is he an attractive candidate for the youth vote? Unlike his old man, Jim specialises in one-liners. With reference to ScoMo’s headwear up country on the drought trail he reckons: “The Prime Minister of Australia shouldn’t wear a Hurley cap with a suit.” They are hard markers this generation.

There’s another boy still in process, Fred, slightly younger and this week more disappointed by Richmond’s failure to make the grand final than he was about not yet getting the vote. But both kids agreed if they had a say at the next election, they would vote for whichever party provided free tertiary education. It was free for me and they cannot see why it shouldn’t be free for them. I agree. Graduates earn higher salaries and anyone who makes over 180k a year is expected to pay half of their earnings in incremental tax. Surely there are good arguments, economic and social for the benefits of free education.

It’s hardly academic though for the kids confronted with the unacceptable choice of debt or no further education. “I’d probably vote Labor,” Fred told me. “I just don’t want to be stuck forever with a giant HECS bill.”

I enlighten the kids that it was free under Menzies (who?) and it was actually Labor in the 1980s who introduced university fees. Shorten has so far only alluded to removing fees for some degrees like science and engineering.

If kids get the vote and the polls narrow, both parties might have to pitch to a smart and demanding new section of the electorate. If the voting-age reform succeeds, there might be at least a million new votes out there for free tertiary education. Probably a lot more, because it’s not just the kids who care. I’d vote for it too and so would most parents. The battle will be on for both young and old.