Teenage power makes its mark
Youthquake. The word sounds very contemporary but it actually dates back to the 1960s when it was coined by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland to talk about the way young people revolutionised music, fashion and culture in that decade. Think Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles.
Change was generational. The Baby Boomers were hitting their late teens and twenties and had money to spend and time on their hands. Pop art brightness and social freedom replaced postwar gloom and austerity.
Five decades later, we have reached another generational crossroads. The Boomers, so memorably diagnosed as the problem not the solution in the dismissive catchphrase ‘‘OK, Boomer’’, and the ever-overlooked Generation X, have been caught out by another youthquake. This one is focused less on fun than political urgency.
Climate change anxiety is central.
The local body elections that put teenagers Sophie Handford and Fisher Wang into politics on the Ka¯ piti Coast and in Rotorua last month were dubbed a youthquake. Ditto for 22-year-old Wellington city councillor Tamatha Paul. You can’t get far into an analysis of those and other youthquakes without hearing about the international example of Greta Thunberg and, locally, Green Party MP Chlo¨ e Swarbrick, who ran for Auckland mayor at the age of 22.
Even National is getting in on the act, selecting
17-year-old William Wood as its Palmerston North candidate for 2020. Wood won over three other challengers, including current list MP Jo Hayes. If a snap election were called between now and his
18th birthday in January, Wood would be ineligible to vote for himself.
As Palmerston North has been held by Labour since 1978, it would take a major blue-quake to tip out the incumbent, Iain Lees-Galloway. Wood’s selection is probably setting him up for a greater future. He also seems to have a generational view – a TED Talk he gave in October explored the pressure that comes with the drive to be ‘‘successful’’. It is a more compassionate message than National has been peddling lately.
The question that inevitably follows conversations about greater youth interest in politics is whether the voting age should be lowered from 18 to 16. The thinking says that, if teenagers can assemble in their thousands to express frustration over climate change inaction, surely they can be trusted to enter the big tent of electoral politics.
A campaign called ‘‘Make it 16’’ was launched in July, backed by Children’s Commissioner Andrew Becroft and the Green Party and opposed by National, whose youth spokesperson Nicola Willis is adamant that ‘‘18 is widely considered to be the age of adulthood in New Zealand’’. The probability that young people would be more likely to vote Green and less likely to vote National may also factor into both parties’ thinking.
But there is a growing school of thought that lowering the voting age could help save democracy, as New Zealand academics Bronwyn Wood and Nick Munn have put it. They argue that ‘‘lowering the voting age to 16 would bring the age of political responsibility more in line with the age of criminal responsibility and the age of informed consent for medical procedures’’.
That would be a hard sell and, if it happens at all, it won’t be soon. But when the voting age fell from 20 to 18 in 1974, it was partly because of the generational shift of the original youthquake. Supporters could point to that precedent.
This [youthquake] is focused less on fun than political urgency. Climate change anxiety is central.