Information deluge won’t faze the young
OPINION: There’s a renewed interest in the general elections in our house this time around.
It’s all because we have an 18-year-old champing at the bit to have her say in New Zealand’s future. The political debates are varied and often.
And I am quick to inform my daughter that she’s voting for the first time in one of the most interesting and entertaining elections in a long time.
The past few weeks could have been a teenage soap opera: the break-up of Andrew and Jacinda; Metiria leaves James; and then Peter Dunne, well, he just broke up with himself.
And it’s all being played out on billboards – which, for something so static, have been pretty dynamic.
My teenager’s political enthusiasm is not normal. Last week there were still about 200,000 under 30-year-olds who hadn’t enrolled to vote.
At the least, that’s sad; at worst, it’s disgraceful that potential first time voters aren’t even interested in the election, given all the information at their fingertips.
Time travel back to the 1980s when I first voted. Politicians had only recently started doing television advertising and the then prime minister Rob Muldoon was the first leader to front in television interviews.
Aside from TV and newspaper advertisements, Dad took me to see the leaders of the two main political parties.
A few years later when I was a politics student, I came to understand that first-time voters based their choice on their closest relationships. They started voting the same as their parents and were unlikely to change in future elections unless they were women and swapped to their husbands’ political views.
Appalling as that is, we could be excused; in those days, we were in an information desert. Now we’re in a torrent of information.
My 18-year-old thinks it’s hilarious that there was no internet to Google party policies. She wonders how you formed a view when you couldn’t follow the social media feeds of party leaders.
There were no blogs, Facebook Live discussions or debates.
There was no 24-hour news coverage and no podcasts to follow, no educational tools like TVNZ’s Vote Compass or Massey University’s On the Fence where a simple quiz lets you know which policies best match your values.
We couldn’t choose regular information sources – it was TV news at 7pm and the morning and afternoon paper, or nothing.
How does a young person make a choice how to vote now? Do their parents and partners have as much impact as they did last century?
Massey University’s Claire Robinson says young voters aren’t apathetic, as many suggest. Political parties haven’t been taking their interests seriously, and so they don’t feel they have a reason to vote.
They find it hard to get good information about which parties share their values; as a result, they’re also bamboozled by the information.
For me, first time voting was a right of passage but now, in an environment of choice, young people don’t necessarily feel compelled to vote.
Talking to my 18-year-old, I see how much parents and the environment are still a big part of how she’s formed the values that influence her decision making.
She’s linked to party blogs and social media pages, but the choices she has made about who to follow are strongly influenced by her home town, her school, her friends and, it turns out, even her parents.
So the wealth of information selected, consciously or unconsciously, reinforces her preconceived views formed in the same way mine were in the 1980s.
While it’s not an easy decision, first time voters have it sweet with the deluge of political marketing and information at their fingertips. There is no excuse not to have their say on election day.
The past few weeks could have been a teenage soap opera.
Cas Carter is a marketing and communications specialist.