“Sixteen-year-olds can drive, give consent, obtain a gun licence, leave school and home… nobody could claim that any of these freedoms required greater maturity than the freedom to cast a ballot.”
Last year, these apparently reasonable words were written by one of the leading campaigners of the “Make it 16” campaign to lower the voting age, herself a larval 14 at the time. Last week the same adolescent filmed herself vandalizing New Conservative political hoardings and posted the clip on her TikTok account.
Silly girl.
Unlike her views on the voting age, the main media outlets have ignored her self-sabotaging tantrum. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and interpret that as looking out for her safety, although they were only too eager to publicise 18-year-old National Party candidate William Wood’s badly drawn Hitler moustache a few months ago.
I have neglected to mention the young woman’s name, as I would rather not be responsible for any online hate that comes her way (note to those types: if you find yourself sending nasty messages to teenage girls you need to take a good hard look at yourself). Besides, as with Greta Thunberg, it is not the young pawns of progressive causes who should be a target of our disgust but the adults behind them.
Frankly, she is merely as stupid and feckless as your average 15-year-old. She has just been caught up in the Left’s drive to grant more and more rights to children at earlier and earlier ages (this drive brakes dramatically at birth and then reverses – foetuses having no rights at all).
Our High Court is currently considering a legal question over the voting age that could deliver progressives a victory as great as the legalization of euthanasia or cannabis.
Several weeks ago, the “Make it 16” campaign presented their argument to the Court that the current voting age is discriminatory as it is inconsistent with the NZ Bill of Rights. This is the same approach that the campaign for voting rights for prisoners took. A legal declaration of inconsistency (from the Supreme Court in that case) followed by a law change via parliament (in 2018, prisoners with sentences shorter than three years regained the right to vote).
Imagine you are able to travel back in time and visit your 16-year-old self. What would you tell the pimply earlier you? ‘Don’t worry, doing that won’t make you blind’, ‘Buy shares in Apple’, ‘The Star Wars prequels are going to be rubbish’ Or ‘You really should get involved in politics’.
The last of these appears to be the Left’s view of what a healthy 16-year-old should be concerned with.
Why?
There is both a practical and philosophical component to this obsession.
The young, being generally foolish, muddleheaded and uninformed, tend to vote Left. Data from a Colmar Brunton poll on the run-up to last year’s election showed that ‘67 per cent of 18-34 year-olds were voting or intending to vote Labour’. Happily, we were saved from a Labour landslide by most of them being too busy lip-syncing Cardi-B songs on TikTok or whatever they do to actually show up and vote. But it was a close-run thing.
By the time of the next general election (2023) there will be 128,400 teens aged 16 and 17 and if these guys get a vote, Chloe Swarbrick could be our next Prime Minister. Enfranchising these youngsters is just good strategic politics from a left-wing point of view.
But it also accords with lefty ideology. Like most of the dumb ideas that currently plague western civilisation, the seeds for the Left’s youth worship were sown during the French Revolution. In 1762 unemployed watchmaker Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote Emile, or On Education, asserting that children were naturally good, adults had little to teach them and it was best if they were left to develop at their own pace. These ideas were later taken up by the Jacobins and inspired their reforming of the French education system. Men less possessed by revolutionary fervour may have paused to consider whether it was wise to take child-rearing advice from a man who had abandoned all five of his own children to orphanages. From there we get child-centred learning in our schools and the current vogue in wider society to genuflect to any inanity uttered by a vaping semi-literate with a hunk of metal through his nose.
But conservatives know better. Perhaps because they actually have families and know what children are really like.
Generally, conservatives are less keen on extending democratic rights. As both the ancients and the framers of the American Constitution knew, too much democracy can be as bad as too little. There is little wisdom in crowds, and a descent into mobocracy is an ever present danger.
Winston Churchill said “The best argument against democracy is five minutes with the average voter” but it will only take two with the average 16-year-old to convince you they need to be barred from the polling booth. I say average as of course there are exceptionally mature youngsters out there, wearing neck-ties and playing the stock market, but they are all pencil-necked dweebs, belong to young ACT and really shouldn’t be encouraged.
Of course as with speed limits, marginal tax rates and the number of drinks your wife lets you have on a week night, voting ages are a purely arbitrary number in themselves. However they reflect wider wisdom – people drive too fast, Jeff Bezos should pay more tax than a toilet cleaner and more than three martinis means a night on the couch.
So let’s not lower the voting age, let’s raise it. Nice and high. Make it 40 – the true age of maturity. The age when you really should have your proverbial together. Property, a significant other, a career, more than two pairs of shoes, your own personal nail-clippers.
Let’s not hand over political decisions to young idiots who skateboard into lamp posts while high on Red Bull. Let’s rely on the mature wisdom of those of us who have skateboarded into lamp posts while high on Red Bull and have learnt from the experience. And apart from the speech impediment and facial twitch, are just fine.
So let’s protect our young from the burden of voting. Much better to keep it for those of us 40 and above, so bored by our jobs, partners and the daily grind that even politics starts to look interesting.
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