To quote Tennessee Williams, there is a “powerful and obnoxious odour of mendacity in this room”, or more specifically the Senate. The Greens have introduced a private member’s bill that, if passed, will lower the voting from 18 to 16. It will, said senator Jordon Steele-John, allow 600,000 young Australians “to engage in the democratic process”.
Expanding democracy is all very well, but we are entitled to be suspicious when the proposal comes from collectivists. After all, this is the same mob that demands slavish adherence to the haughty proclamations of unelected human rights commissioners, and which also calls for a bill of rights, which would effectively see the judiciary usurp Parliament’s role. Could it be this bill is motivated by the likelihood the Greens would disproportionately benefit from the resultant vote? Not according to Steele-John, who claimed the additional votes would be distributed “pretty evenly” between the major parties and the Greens.
Pardon me, senator, but your mendacity is showing, or should I say stinking. A poll by Youth Action in 2016 found that 44.6 per cent of those aged between 17 and 25 support the Greens. While not quite as high, a Fairfax-Ipsos poll that year found the Greens’ primary vote was as high as 32 per cent in the 18-24 category. It prompted the Greens leader, senator Richard Di Natale, to declare brazenly on live television “If there was a vote amongst people who are under 30 in Australia, there’d possibly be a Greens prime minister.”
Last week ABC Radio National’s Fran Kelly interviewed Amos Washington, 23, Australia’s Youth Delegate to the United Nations, who supports the Steele-John bill, and who has conducted a mass consultation on with adolescents on the subject. Asked about how this change would affect the major parties, Washington professed ignorance.
“To be honest I couldn’t say,” he said. “I think I would be doing a disservice to the young people that I consulted with last year if I was to generalise about what political party they’d be inclined to vote for. You know I think we hear this particular argument quite often and I do find it kind of frustrating because it really isn’t relevant in this conversation …”
Hang on, Kelly should have interjected, you have consulted more than 4000 adolescents about having more of a say in politics, yet you claim you do not have an inkling of their voting preferences? But she did not. Neither did she refer to Di Natale’s boastful claim or the research that indicated this change would be very favourable to the Greens.
Additional research has also revealed the change would benefit Labor. Other analyses indicate the vote for the Coalition could decline by 0.2 per cent. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has previously supported the proposal, The Australian announcing in 2015: “Mr Shorten has charged his youth spokesman, Sam Dastyari, to consult with community leaders and young people across the country…”. Dastyari was only 30 when elected to the Senate. Having been compromised by a wealthy Chinese businessman and donor Huang Xiangmo, who has links to the ruling Communist Party, he resigned last year. Perhaps Shorten’s focus should not be harnessing the youthful exuberance of adolescent voters, but instead ensuring future party candidates have the requisite maturity for high office.
At 24, Steele-John is the youngest current federal parliamentarian. Born in Britain, he at least the common sense to renounce his UK citizenship prior to running in the 2016 election, unlike his predecessor, Scott Ludlam, who was born in New Zealand. In introducing the bill to parliament, he stated: “It will facilitate greater civics education and allow teachers to bring process — not party politics — into the classroom in a tangible way.”
There is that powerful and obnoxious odour again. Party politics are already well-entrenched in the classroom thanks to the activism of teachers sympathetic to the Greens’ policies. Does Steele-John really maintain that the NSW and Victorian teachers who in 2016 were part of the ‘Teachers for Refugees’ campaign — who defied a directive not to wear ‘Close the camps, bring them here’ T-shirts — have no connection with the Greens?
But would this strategy play out as expected? Let us return to the hypothetical case of ‘Tabitha’, a precocious student in a Melbourne inner-city public school whom we met last year. Now in the fourth grade, she continues to be her own woman. We begin again with a note from her teacher to Tabitha’s parents.
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Dear Mr and Ms Smith, today I asked the children to write responses to the question ‘With the perilous threat of man-made climate change in mind, what do you think are some of the positives which would result from lowering the voting age to 16?’ I then received the following email from Tabitha. “Miss, you are here to educate, not indoctrinate. Please refrain from these tendentious premises and keep your activism out of the classroom.” I am confident that this is just a lapse and ask for your support in ensuring Tabitha’s contributions are conducive to the learning experience.
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Tabitha is proving challenging. Today I encouraged students to write to politicians to let them know their views on lowering the voting age. Tabitha refused, saying “this change could be achieved without legislative amendment”. At first I was intrigued and asked her to share how Australia could go about this. “Simple really,” said Tabitha, before adding facetiously, “Given the lunatics of subjectivity hold that feelings trump facts every time, we kids could just *identify* as an eighteen-year-old. QED.” As this task is clearly not to Tabitha’s liking, I’ve told her instead to research examples of progressive societies empowering youth, which she readily agreed to do.
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Well that was a show and tell session that I’ll never forget. “Today I want to talk about the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” began Tabitha. “It was a classic example of encouraging malleable and unsuspecting students to treat with contempt the knowledge of their forebears and to commit utter barbarities in the name of empowering youth”. Before I could intervene she produced photographs of Chinese children beating their teachers to death for the crime of rightist deviationism. “My conclusion is we must always be sceptical of the motives of those who seek to involve children in their activism,” said Tabitha to a horrified class. Several children have since asked to see the school counsellor.
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This kid is becoming unbearable. I was giving a lesson today on why it was vital to reduce carbon emissions if we are to reduce global temperatures when Tabitha interrupted me. ‘How much did Julia Gillard’s carbon tax reduce global temperatures’, she asked. When I said that was an irrelevant argument, she pointed out a recent analysis by BAEconomics that found Labor’s 45 per cent emissions reduction target would cost the Australian economy $472 billion by 2030. I remonstrated with her by saying that material considerations were insignificant compared to preserving nature’s beautiful greenery, to which she smiled sweetly and said, “And on that note, Miss, I hear Venezuela is ever so verdant this time of year.”
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This was a perfectly reasonable composition question for students. ‘Should government ministers’ wages be conditional on reducing carbon emissions?’ In response, your little minx has raised awareness about what she claims is the school’s “ordinary” performance in the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy tests. She has circulated a petition to her fellow students to the effect that teachers’ wages should be dependent on this school achieving reasonable NAPLAN results. When I told her she was being inconsiderate and offensive, she acted all innocent and said “Don’t you believe in children exercising their democratic rights, Miss?’
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I have never been so embarrassed in my life. We were privileged to be visited by our local federal MP and Greens member, Adam Bandt, who spoke of how much he valued the opinions of young people and how we could improve democracy by reducing the voting age. “Excuse my ignorance,” butted in Tabitha, completely off-topic, “but didn’t you write in your PhD thesis that ‘the parliamentary road to socialism is non-existent’, something that you kept hidden when you ran for election?” As impertinent as that was, what she said later was far worse when Adam asked the children what more Greens in parliament would mean for them. “A bad case of the Trots,” she replied, “in more ways than one!”
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Last night I dreamt of Stephen King’s ‘Children of the Corn’ and woke up screaming. Mind you, the kids in that film were angels compared to this bride of Satan. Today Tabitha announced to a cheering class that my “meddling with young minds” had inspired her to seek a career in politics in order to fight for libertarian principles and combat “statist control freaks”. Dear God, I’ve become an unwilling Mary Shelley.
Causational goose of the week
Would it be too much to expect the usual postulators to hold off attributing blame for the Christchurch tragedy?
The Greens’ learned blockhead
High-flying barrister Julian Burnside has work to do in order to convince the great unwashed that he’s not just another pious toff.