Are our MPs too old to truly represent us?
As you read this, a group of MPs is heading to the United States for a youth political leaders’ junket. The press release announcing the trip describes the team as ‘‘young’’ – which is both quite a stretch and a totally reasonable statement.
Labour’s Priyanca Radhakrishnan, who is leading the delegation, is 40. The rest of the MPs are in their mid to late 30s, save for National’s Simeon Brown, who is 28.
But in politics ‘‘young’’ is a very relative term.
The average age of this Parliament’s MPs is roughly 50, the average age of Cabinet roughly 51. (The prime minister is the youngest member of Cabinet and the only one under 40.) This is generally commensurate with other democratic societies, which have for many years had an average age of about 50.
There are standout young MPs, like the aforementioned Brown and Green MP Chloe Swarbrick, who was elected at 23. But we generally seem to like our politicians older, meaning that group can fairly be described as young. Is that good enough?
Many would argue that older politicians make sense. They bring life experience from other fields, the virulence of youthful ideology tempered by the cooling balm of years in the real world, not university debating societies.
But Parliament is supposed to be a house of representatives. And the median age of Kiwis at the end
of last year was 37, meaning roughly half of all Kiwis are 37 or younger. Yet not much more than a tenth of parliamentarians (14 of 120) are the same.
Is this necessarily a bad thing? That’s an open question. But it is easy to see why young people might feel that long-term issues that will change the trajectory of their entire lives – like climate change! – might be easier to fob off by a bunch of politicians who won’t be around to see the worst of it.
KiwiBuild, a policy built to appeal to young people, was basically abandoned this week, by a Government that has either given up on, or hugely delayed, most policy proposals which would hurt anyone born before 1975.
Of course, averages miss a lot. Both of New Zealand’s main political parties are led by people near to the median age – Jacinda Ardern at 39 and Simon Bridges at 42. Both of them will be alive and possibly still in politics when the consequences of the decisions they are making now are borne out.
Demographic representation isn’t everything. Two of the largest youth political movements in recent election cycles have favoured two old white men: Jeremy Corbyn in the UK (70) and Bernie Sanders in the US (77). But is it healthy that US President Donald Trump, 73, will in all likelihood face another septuagenarian next year (Joe Biden is 76, Sanders 77, and Elizabeth Warren 70)?
There is a concern, well articulated by Cambridge political scientist David Runciman, that one of the big problems in politics isn’t that politicians are less and less like us, but that we are becoming more like them. Society in New Zealand and many other Western countries is slowly ageing, getting us closer to that average age of 50. We’re also more likely to have done some sort of post-high-school education, once the exclusive domain of the elite that got elected.
This is on the whole a good thing – it means we have wider access to education and better medical care.
But it also makes it much harder for us to trust politicians with hard decisions because we no longer credibly see them as both smarter and older than us. Representative democracy doesn’t work as well when so much of society thinks they could do a better job. Yet direct democracy, which New Zealand appears to be leaning closer and closer to, has serious deficiencies – see Brexit.
The other problem identified by Runciman is exclusion. There will always be young people. If both society and politicians are generally a lot older than you and seem to be ignoring the issues that matter to you, the whole system can very easily seem stacked against you – and you might be right.
New Zealand is a democracy with a relatively low barrier to entry, so why don’t the young just organise and vote? Bernard Hickey, writing for Newsroom, blamed the Kardashians for keeping the young on the couch and away from the voting booth. This dated reference is reductive and misses one of the bigger barriers – the voting age.
Half of Kiwis are 37 or under but a whole lot of that cohort are cut off by the arbitrary barrier of 18. This means the average eligible voter is well into their 40s and the average actual voter, since young people are quite bad at turning out, is even older.
The arguments against lowering the voting age can often be quite persuasive – who among us would trust our teenage selves to make any serious decisions? – but those same arguments generally work pretty well for very old people too, and no-one would ever dream of taking the vote off them.
Indeed, the tenets of one-personone-vote basically guarantee that you will give the vote to all manner of people you wouldn’t trust to move a set of drawers for you. That’s democracy.
And given that turnout among young people is so low, wouldn’t it make a lot of sense to help them vote for the first time at the last point where the state has a huge role shaping their day-to-day lives – high school? With a lower voting age parties would have more to gain from policies that benefited the young, and we wouldn’t be stuck in a position where most young people voted for Left-wing parties, because other parties would be trying to woo them too.
Runciman caused a lot of controversy in the UK taking this argument to its extreme edge and suggesting six-year-olds should be able to vote. I would find it hard to make that argument with a straight face, no matter the logical consistency.
But giving teenagers the right to vote seems like a no-brainer. Maybe then we might have some actual young people to send on those junkets.
Half of Kiwis are 37 or under but a whole lot of that cohort are cut off by the arbitrary voting barrier of 18.