Give young people the chance to vote

Young people in New Zealand are turning their backs on politics in record numbers and it’s time to act before apathy becomes ingrained – it’s time we lowered the voting age to 16.

Children’s commissioner Andrew Becroft this week proposed having a rational discussion about the radical move’s pros and cons.

This is a good first step, but it needs to be done quickly and thoroughly, before we lose an entire generation.

The past few general elections have seen a disturbing decline in the number of young New Zealanders casting a vote.

In 2014, 37 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds enrolled to vote didn’t bother showing up at the ballet box, while 38 per cent of 25 to 29 year olds also stayed home.

Whether they are turned off by the cynical nature of politics, simply disinterested or feel disenfranchised and forgotten by a political consensus hell-bent on securing the baby-boomer vote, it’s alarming that the leaders of our future seem not to want to have a say.

Former Greens MP Sue Bradford has, in the past, championed lowering the age. She got nowhere.

But it has happened overseas, including in Scotland.

We, too, should be welcoming the chance for a new voting demographic to enter the political fray.

Lowering the age to 16 gives us the best chance to ingrain voting as a habit. Many teens aged 16 to 18 are still at school and can be given a forum to discuss and debate ideas and opinions.

Arguments against the move seem to focus on a so-called lack of full development and apparent tendency for teens to simply mirror their parents’ thoughts.

These are spurious and patronising.

Sure, we probably all thought differently at age 16 compared with our grown selves, but that doesn’t make our former musings wrong.

You could mount a similar argument that there should be an upper limit on voting as older people have less of a stake in the country’s future.

Rightly, nobody is suggesting such a ridiculous and discriminatory move.

For our politics, both national and local, to be truly representative, we need to enfranchise as wide a cross-section of society as possible and we must start by including more teens.

It’s unlikely anything will change soon, but it should. Becroft’s proposal is a good place to start.