Three years ago the British parliament voted across party lines to raise the minimum age of marriage from 16 to 18, following a long campaign to protect adolescent girls from coerced or forced unions.
In Britain today it is illegal to perform tattoo or gender-altering surgery on a person under 18, with or without parental consent. Under-18s cannot bet, buy tobacco, own a firearm, enter a sex shop or watch an X-rated film. Obviously.
Clinical evidence shows the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, planning and rational decision-making – is not fully developed in the average human until around the age of 25. Yet by the time of the next British general election, 16 and 17-year-olds may be casting votes.
Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told the BBC last week: “I’ve felt passionate about this for a long time. This is about engaging young people in what’s going to happen in the future.” Rayner insists this is not about trying to rig the vote in Labour’s favour. Yet it hardly needs spelling out that the Labour Party has an obvious interest in lowering the voting age.
Polling consistently shows that neurologically underdeveloped voters tend to favour parties of the left. That is to say voters under 25, the age at which the prefrontal cortex typically reaches full maturity, consistently prefer left-of-centre parties to those on the centre right. The latest YouGov survey in Britain, for example, found that Labour (28 per cent) was narrowly in front of the Greens (26 per cent) in the 18-24 cohort. The Conservatives (9 per cent) trailed in fourth position behind the Lib Dems (20 per cent).
The debate over whether voting should be confined to citizens capable of managing impulses, weighing trade-offs and engaging with complex decisions was lost long ago. Yet the shift towards enfranchising younger teens has little in common with earlier voting age reforms, which were grounded in detailed inquiries and principled arguments.
When Britain lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in 1969, it did so on the recommendation of the Latey Committee’s 1967 Age of Majority report, which examined civil law provisions affecting young adults. The report recommended that 18 be the minimum age for entering contracts, making wills, consenting to medical treatment and other markers of adult legal responsibility.
The 26th amendment to the US constitution, ratified in just three months in 1971, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in direct response to the Vietnam War draft, which conscripted nearly a million 18 to 21-year-olds. In Australia, the Whitlam government’s 1973 reforms were adopted with bipartisan support – accompanied by more than a little embarrassment from opposition benches that they hadn’t moved earlier.
By contrast, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s plan to enfranchise 16-year-olds feels cheap and opportunistic – devoid of serious rationale, absent any considered review and unsupported by evidence that it will strengthen democratic engagement. It is the policy equivalent of a mood board: a few social media talking points, a vague appeal to progress and a sanctimonious air of redressing past wrongs.
The Conservatives may huff and puff but they’ll almost certainly support the measure in their desperation to appear modern and relevant to a generation that is never going to vote for them anyway. If there is any justice, it may yet backfire: the rising Greens vote, the potential for a Corbynite breakaway party and the surprisingly strong youth support for Nigel Farage all suggest the youth vote is not the reliable left bloc it once was.
Which brings us to Australia, where Anthony Albanese will be watching developments with interest. What would stop Labor from amending the Commonwealth Electoral Act to add 16 and 17-year-olds to the electoral roll before the next election? Only a sense of shame about breaking yet another pre-election promise – not, it must be said, a high bar.
Labor backed a Senate inquiry into lowering the voting age in 2018 and endorsed its findings in principle. Its hesitancy came down to the question of whether voting under 18 should be compulsory.
Cantankerous Sky News commentators will grumble into their lapel mics (this one included), but the political incentive to go along with it may prove irresistible to the opposition. Resistance would carry a social cost: the appearance of being out of touch with a generation raised to believe that youth equals truth.
That belief has deep cultural roots. In 2018, 15-year-old Greta Thunberg told a UN plenary session: “We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. We have come here to let you know that change is coming.” Once, Thunberg might have been reprimanded for her impertinence. Today, she is celebrated as a prophet, untainted by compromise or corruption, her moral clarity held up as a rebuke to adult failure.
The romanticisation of youth has rarely ended well. In Maoist China, teenage Red Guards, convinced of their moral superiority, were unleashed to purge counter-revolutionary thinking – with catastrophic consequences.
In revolutionary France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideal of the “natural child” – untainted by social corruption – fed the moral absolutism of the Reign of Terror.
In our own time, the teenager with a selfie stick and an Instagram account is granted the platform and status of an emerging moral authority.
Extending voting rights to this cohort accelerates the transfer of political legitimacy from those whose judgment is tempered by experience to those still untouched by disappointment and contradiction. None of this is to suggest that young people should be excluded from civic life. Their energy and passion are vital, and political awareness in adolescence can lay the foundations for lifelong engagement. But awareness is not the same as judgment and fervour is not a substitute for wisdom.
Democracies depend not just on the will of the people but on the capacity of the people to weigh complexity, anticipate consequences and govern themselves.
As I was writing this column, news broke of the death of John Stone, aged 96. Reflection will give us a clearer picture of the substantial contribution he made to civic life as a passionate, intelligent and patriotic reformer.
This much is clear, however: Australia is a more prosperous, fairer and more hopeful country than it might have been had Stone not pursued a career in public policy. He is sorely missed.
Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.
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