Dear Pauline, leave my right to vote alone
THE One Nation Senator’s comments about Australian teenagers are, to be perfectly frank, ignorant and insulting, Caleb Bond writes.
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IN THE midst of a discussion this week on Sunrise about whether the sale of tobacco should be banned to people under the age of 21, One Nation’s Pauline Hanson somehow segued into the voting age.
“Raising the (smoking) age limit makes common sense to me,” Hanson told her audience.
“I’d also look at raising the age of voting as well to 21.”
Even the most experienced of newscasters couldn’t have thought that one up.
She went on to say 18-year-olds “don’t have any idea”.
“They’ve never held a job, they’ve never paid any taxes, they have no understanding of politics.”
Well, I’ve managed to achieve all of those at 18. And so have many young people I know. Hanson’s comments are, to be perfectly frank, ignorant and insulting.
It’s a common trope that young people have no idea what they’re doing when it comes to politics. True, many don’t. But to assert that everyone between the ages of 18 and 21 should have their voice in the democratic process taken away from them because some of our mates haven’t taken an interest is absurd.
It’s as ridiculous as banning over-80s from voting because some people might go senile and have no idea what they’re on about. Or akin to raising the age at which you can get your learner’s driving permit from 16 to 18 because there was a decrease in the number of 16-year-olds signing up. Just because some have no interest, it doesn’t mean others aren’t keen as mustard to be part of the process.
Eighteen-year-olds are legally deemed adults — and we’re the ones who’ll have to live in this world for another 60-or-so years. To deny us our say would be cruel.
I enrolled to vote as soon as I turned 18. In the lead-up to the current marriage law postal survey, 98,000 people registered themselves on the electoral roll for the first time.
Of that group, 66 per cent — or 65,000 people — were between the ages of 18 and 24. That was in the space of just two weeks.
So it’s evident that young people are not totally disengaged from politics and they do have an idea of what they’re doing. The real issue is engaging them — and throwing insults around won’t help.
We need better political education. Young people should come out of school with a full understanding of our legal and political systems and the history behind how we got here.
You ask any disengaged young person why they don’t care about politics and almost every one of you will say they don’t understand it.
If we breed understanding, we breed interest.
Why would you see any reason to partake in something you can’t get your head around and that no one has bothered to explain to you?
I argued in these pages two years ago against a suggestion from Bill Shorten that we should drop the voting age to 16 — when I was 16. Our political education simply wasn’t up to scratch, and extending the vote to more people would still do nothing to encourage them to participate.
But we have to draw an arbitrary line in the sand somewhere — and it makes sense that line is 18. At 18 I can be sent to war, sign a legal contract, buy alcohol and take on all the other responsibilities associated with becoming an adult.
If you raise the voting age, you can’t argue against raising all the others, too. There would be something askew if a government could send me off to war while I had no say in choosing that government.
Voting, like much of what else comes with adulthood, is a responsibility. And it ought to be treated as an important and exciting one.
To deny my friends and me of the democratic right we were promised would be an utter betrayal.