Time to break our sheepish silence on lowering voting age
Children’s Commissioner Judge Andrew Becroft is right on the money suggesting to a parliamentary select committee that the New Zealand voting age be lowered to 16.
When I was a whipper snapper my father took me along to election campaign meetings in the hope I would become interested in the political process.
I remember clapping eyes on Piggy Muldoon and thinking his head was so big in proportion to the rest of his body that an alien must have been involved in his conception.
Dressed from head to foot in a rhapsody of unrelieved beige crimplene, Social Credit leader Bruce Beetham seemed leached of all colour, while Gentleman Jack Marshall looked like he needed a damn good sleep.
This early exposure to observing political leaders in the flesh worked. In our family, election nights rated up there with Christmas, and were more special because elections happened only once every three years. My siblings and I would gather round the TV set and vie with each other to fill in the electorate results in the provided sheets torn from the newspaper.
In those days you didn’t know the result till late in the day, which sometimes meant staying up way past your bedtime. This special dispensation my father gave because he thought it essential his offspring see democracy in action in the hope we would become engaged in the political process.
Judge Becroft has also suggested a lower voting age should require the implementation of a civics education in school. The Government, which has signalled radical education reform, should take the opportunity to introduce civics into the school syllabus, not only to acquaint children with the nuts and bolts of the workings of our parliamentary system, but to give them a voice.
Surely this would result in greater voter participation, perhaps producing the much desired ‘‘youth-quake’’ turnout. The Electoral Commission has bent over backwards to try to get young people to vote. In 2017, 148,000 of them exercised their right, probably due to the commission’s Kids Voting programme.
For too long, not bothering to vote has been the option for young adults who think it’s cool to abstain. This entrenched attitude that all politicians are corrupt and out for themselves, and that young people don’t have a hope of influencing policy pertaining to their needs and desires, has become a huge problem.
More has to be done so that the youth demographic feels part of the process, rather than cynical observers barely bothering to give it a glance from the outside.
Teaching civics in schools and encouraging lively debate will help develop a voice that has been morose and largely silent.
One of the myths New Zealanders have about themselves is that we aren’t afraid to stand up for our rights, that we are brave Kiwi battlers punching above our weight.
But the reality is that we are a tiny country that has to swallow a lot of dead rats to keep in the game. And on an individual level many of the rights fought for us and gained by the effort and sacrifice of our parents and grandparents, have been eroded. It’s as if they never happened.
Listening and watching our fellow countrymen and women being voxpopped in the street and appearing on television and radio to opine on issues of the day, we struggle to string a sentence together, or seem to have no clue about what’s going on.
We have become non-verbally nonchalant and abrogated our responsibility to properly communicate. That is why ‘‘Shrugger’’ John Key became so popular, because he celebrated the lazy-tongued ignorance in all of us.
He reinvented the ‘‘she’ll be right attitude’’ and encouraged ‘‘most New Zealanders’’ as he referred to the mindless mob, to lie back and let it all happen around us.
Compare our incoherent utterances coming from the street in television programmes like Back Benches with the strong and impassioned voices of students in America. And I’m not talking about just after the Florida shootings.
I suspect that the teaching of civics in American schools has helped develop a voice that can, at the drop of hat, sound clear and credible. We actually want to listen to what they are saying and their message is – there’s a revolution going on in America and they are at the front of it.
We New Zealanders need to start oiling our own tongues so we can express ourselves with dignity and coherence. Remaining inarticulate is getting us nowhere.
It is making us depressed, angry and turns us into a moody sheep, that foolish flock that deep down we suspect we will always be. And politics isn’t just about what’s happening or not happening down at the Beehive. Speaking out with the help of a good grounding in civics would be a good place to start the revolution.