OPINION
Jack
Like all good power-hungry narcissists worth their salt, when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Enter stage far-left, Jacinda Ardern, and her coalition Green Party partners, and their latest Machiavellian scheme to cement absolute power for eternal socialism: handing teenagers the right to vote.
Taking their case to the country’s Supreme Court to have two previous judicial dismissals reversed—and succeeding—the lobby group responsible for such a turnaround, Make It 16, a self-declared ‘non-partisan youth-led campaign’ borne out of New Zealand’s spotty-specced Youth Parliament in 2019, was quick to celebrate.
“This is history”, said the group’s clearly confused ‘They/Them’ co-director, Caeden Tipler, a former aide to current Green Party MP and ‘human rights’ lawyer, Golriz Ghahraman, giving one some indication, perhaps, of how ‘non-partisan’ the group might actually be.
Indeed, a speedy scan of their own website history provides firm evidence of how deceptive such a claim is:
‘Our launching event was hosted by Chlöe Swarbrick and featured speeches from many people including then Children’s Commissioner Judge Andrew Becroft, Wellington City Councillor Tamatha Paul, Labour MP Greg O’Connor and many more.’
Alongside councillor Paul, also a female politician connected to the Greens, Swarbrick herself, is, in many respects, the party’s defacto poster child, having been the youngest MP to enter parliament since 1975 when she was just 23 years old.
A committed vegan (obviously), in a previously revealing interview back in 2019, Swarbrick, in addition to openly admitting she sees a ‘psychologist on a weekly basis’ and takes ‘anti-depressants’, also provided snapshots of her day-to-day life when asked hard-hitting questions about her favourite fashion brands,
“I wear, as most female politicians do, a bit of Juliette Hogan…I mostly wear Kowtow and Ingrid Starnes. I have quite a few tee-shirts actually…I do buy 27 Names. My black pants are 27 Names.”
Call me a cynic, but black pants that set one back anywhere from $350 to $450, as the online shop suggests, doesn’t seem to balance particularly well with her ‘our generation is poorer’ gripe she constantly wishes to propagate on school campuses everywhere, but then, I suppose, since when did Green Party virtue-signalling ever match up with disciplined fiscal policy?
No doubt a prerequisite to help the campaign itself, virtue-signalling, it appears from the outset, is very much a staple diet, amplified all the way to a Spinal Tap 11 when met with a five-strong face-masked Make It 16 homepage.
Critical-thinking, apparently, not as important to a so-called ‘democratic’ cause as bowing down to ‘public health’ protocols of en masse pro-government groupthink.
This is a cause, by the way, that has just had its claims of ‘unjustified age discrimination’ [re voting], supposedly breaching the nation’s 1990 Bill of Rights Act, ratified by the courts.
This was also, of course, the same act, in conjunction with the 1993 Human Rights Act, that was almost entirely usurped by the Labour government’s COVID-19 Public Health Response Act in 2020, which was readily passed through parliament by all parties.
As many of us very well know, powers of such overarching reach which affected people’s everyday rights to employment, movement and life itself, were implemented overnight at the expense of common, humane law as we once knew it.
Despite ample evidence, to give just one example, that vaccine ‘effectiveness’ was waning dramatically over time, therefore leading to questions about their all-round net-benefit, justices within New Zealand’s Supreme Court apparatus still refused to acknowledge such undeniable facts.
More often ruling in favour of the government when challenged with other Bill of Rights breaches such as the Right to refuse to undergo medical treatment when nationwide vaccine mandates for schools and hospitals were introduced, oddly, in those cases, regardless of blatant vaccine deficiencies, the courts found no discrimination whatsoever.
Forced out of work for a leaky vaccine suddenly trumped one’s right to work free from discrimination.
In fact, so heavy-handed was the Covid Act, so much power did it wield and hand to the courts, that utterly egregious judgements whereby some parents were even refused child visiting rights for remaining unvaccinated became a truly despicable ‘new normal’ episode.
Fast-forward to present day, however, and one will find face-nappied groups of left-wing student activists, supported by droves of politically-motivated lawyers, winning milestone verdicts without too much complication.
And so, with the door now flung open to reform voting legislation at both local and national level, Jacinda Ardern has wasted no time drafting her first attempt well inside a six-month timeframe, as directed by a suspiciously opportune and post-pandemic New Zealand Bill of Rights (Declarations of Inconsistency) Amendment Bill.
The bill, passed just this August, essentially forces parliament’s hand—via the attorney general—to debate and/or propose new law(s) if any breach of the Bill of Rights is found by the judiciary.
Thankfully, this doesn’t come without its challenges.
For electoral law to change entirely, 75 per cent of parliament must agree a ‘supermajority’—an unlikely number to achieve thus far considering current opposition, as confirmed by National Party leader, Christopher Luxon, not long after the decision, when he said,
“Many other countries have a voting age of 18, and National has seen no compelling case to lower the age.”
Although there may be a case that in other countries where the voting age has been lowered to 16 and 17 that the proportion of voters has produced higher election turnouts (such as the Scottish independence referendum in 2014), it is also irrefutable, that the majority of teenagers of that age almost always side with the political left.
We see this borne out in various statistics around the world.
On the continent, a 2017 post-election Dutch survey by state broadcaster NOS, found that if only all 18 to 24-year-olds had voted, the shift in parliamentary representation would have meant two left-leaning parties, including the Greens, receiving the majority of seats over their centrist and right-wing rivals.
Similarly, in Australia, New Zealand’s closest neighbour, following their latest Australian Election Study audit of the 2019 federal election, it found 81 per cent of all 18 to 24-year-olds voted for the two major left-wing parties, including Labor and the Greens, respectively—the highest on record; inversely, just 31 per cent of over 65s voted for the same duo.
Whilst in the UK, an Institute of Economic Affairs poll of 16 to 34-year-olds from July last year, found ‘67 per cent of young Brits’ wanting to implement a ‘socialist economic system’. Furthermore, in the same poll, rather worryingly, 75 per cent of young participants agreed with the statement that ‘socialism is a good idea, but it has failed in the past because it has been badly done’.
Even in New Zealand itself, the typical argument used in favour of under 18 voting whereby young people are deemed too ‘disengaged’ within their own democracies, is simply not applicable.
The voting percentage of youth enrollment, those aged 18 to 24, over the course of the past three general elections, in fact, has increased every time; from 63 per cent in 2014, 69 per cent in 2017, to 78 per cent as of 2020—the third-highest voting bloc of all people under the age of 50-years at the time.
Nevertheless, Make It 16’s teenage tantrum, dripping in ‘climate crisis’ catastrophism and panic, following in the same vein as their Green Party backers, has most certainly made waves.
‘Now let’s do what’s right to strengthen our democracy!’ exclaimed Ghahraman on her Twitter page in the aftermath of the ruling.
But is it strengthening democracy, or, as it surely looks, simply loading the deck for the future? A future, one should add, that looks increasingly less likely as current polls stand, to form a left-wing coalition government at next year’s election.
What a coincidence.
Indeed, where do the suggestions that ‘Voting is a fundamental right’, as the Make It 16 campaign list as one of five ‘reasons’ to enact their demands, end? ‘Every voice deserves to be heard in a democracy’, they go on.
Okay, forget high-schoolers, then, why not hear the concerns of ten-year-old primary school children? But if they get to be heard, then why not five-year-olds who have just begun their primary school pilgrimage?
It sounds absurd, but this has actually been a direction of travel pondered by ‘academics’ in the past, including one Professor David Runciman, head of politics, no less, at Cambridge University, who believed that six-year-olds should be allowed to vote because an ‘ageing population’ was ‘creating a democratic crisis’.
The fact of the matter is, it’s an unsustainable slippery slope. Once one opens the floodgates to some children being involved in democracy—and that is what 16 and 17-year-olds are—the limits appear to be endless.
In a world of drag queen story times and ‘family friendly’ pride parades, it’s not as if so-called ‘progressive’ society isn’t against exploiting very young children, is it?
As former youth MP James Broome-Isa put it, a critic of the verdict, when debating Tipler on television,
“It’s robbing our childhood…What you’re saying is you deserve the right to vote but you’re also not responsible enough to have the other views of adults such as the right to drink, smoke, vape etc.”
Tipler responded, “different ages are appropriate for different things”.
How convenient.
But perhaps the most striking data in recent memory that we can point to to explain the egocentric nature of the Make It 16 campaign—a campaign so obviously terrified that the ‘world is literally burning’, à la Greta Thunberg—is from a Pew Research Center survey published in March 2020.
In it, they discovered that ‘white liberals’ between the ages of 18-29, were ‘more likely to be diagnosed with a mental health condition than moderates or conservatives’; this translated to 46 per cent of young white liberal respondents, compared to 26 per cent of young white moderates, and 21 per cent of young white conservatives.
Incredibly, the study also showed that ‘young white females’ who ‘identified as liberal or very liberal’ were significantly more likely to report a mental health diagnosis at 56 per cent, compared to 28 per cent of young moderate women and 27 per cent of young conservative women.
Although to a much lesser extent, a mental health diagnosis also remained highest in ‘young liberal white males’ at 34 per cent.
In light of their recent victory, some will no doubt proclaim the future looks very bright; keep your eyes peeled, by the way, for an agenda-driven media class ready to ramp up the pressure on all opposing voices.
But to others like me, it looks devastatingly unstable.
It’s why even New Zealand’s Pied Piper of an entire green-blob bulwark, Chlöe Swarbrick, is popping pills left, right, and centre, whilst using teenage mindsets like her own for personal political profit.