The troubling post-pandemic years ahead will only make plainer the injustice of excluding 16- and 17-year-olds from the franchise, argues Daniel Dummer
Australian 16- and 17-year-olds make adult decisions every day. They can – and do – work, pay tax, drive, join the army, consent to sex, marriage and (nearly everywhere) medical treatments. In fact, in NSW we charge children with crimes as young as 14 or even 10, the same age at which we permit strip searches.
The covid-19 crisis raises a stark question: are the momentous decisions governments now make about our future to be taken without the formal participation of young Australians?
If you recognise the importance of voting, you should demand for it to be among the first rights we extend and not the last. Australians should join the franchise at age 16.
Democratic visibility
Let us start from the basic liberal premise: governments must not abridge rights of citizens except to prevent manifest harm.
No right can be more fundamental in a democracy than a citizen’s influence over their leaders. Young Australians may have a variety of tools in their political toolkit, but these are no substitute for – and indeed they are impoverished in the absence of – the right to vote.
Nothing else suffices. It is crucial to understand why.
It was American economist Anthony Downs who applied Hotelling’s law to two-party electoral systems, arguing that parties would converge on platforms designed to appeal to the median voter.
It’s a simplistic model but it illustrates something powerful: every vote counts because every voter counts – by virtue of influencing where the median lies. It is your very name on the electoral roll, and the interest of the parties in winning your support, that makes you powerful. It is your democratically visibility.
Without you, and every other voter your age, many or even all the same MPs might hold office – but they would have got there with very different policies.
In this way two injustices of the status quo become clear: young Australians are deprived of the responsive government they deserve; and the rest of us are deprived of their substantive input to the policies that govern us all.
This means the analogies that cloud this debate – on both sides – are largely beside the point. Voting is less a rite of passage than a basic liberal protection. If anything it is like the presumption of innocence or right to a fair trial: we should rather enfranchise the unworthy than disenfranchise the worthy.
Can you imagine a government setting a pension rate without formal input from pensioners? Or a strategy to address domestic violence without formal input from women? Australian teens are no less a constituency in social and economic policy. Youth unemployment, which never returned to pre-GFC levels, has jumped a further 15 per cent since mid-March for Australians aged 15-19 years. With no degree, no mobility, no skills or experience, they face a reeling university sector, a scarred economy and wellbeing effects that will last until they retire. Ian Hickie notes in The Australian that Europe and the United States are still seeing the economic loss from underemployment and mental ill-health inflicted on young people by the GFC.
It is no coincidence that youth policies rarely occupy a news cycle and the prime minister mostly addresses adults (My government is supporting you). When he does speak of education or youth employment, he addresses adults then, too – not youth themselves (My government is supporting them). In one case, helping; in the other, handling. My point is not that Scott Morrison is an uncaring person. It is simply that governments don’t waste breath.
Thin excuses for disenfranchisement
Opponents worry that teenagers will contaminate the pool of informed voters. Yet adults are untested and their rights unquestioned – even as the prime minister admonishes their childish behaviour.
And such concerns are fundamentally illiberal. Votes are a test for governments not citizens.
To quote from a Liberal maiden speech at random:
“Politics is about seeking power though democratic means in order to take power away from the elites, whether bureaucratic or corporate, and return power to the people.”
Yet as Chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, his inquiry into lowering the voting age later observed:
“The maturity of the young witnesses before the inquiry, and their thoughtful examination of the issues, was excellent, however, these engaged young people may not be representative of their wider cohort… These arguments are emotive and do not provide a good foundation on which to base a change to the franchise.”
Having fully conceded the capacity of particular teenagers to vote, the illiberal conclusion lands with a thud: they are to stay disenfranchised just in case they have unworthy peers. Imagine applying this logic to adults.
What is at stake? The inquiry chair, Senator James McGrath, wrote:
“Whilst there are many aspects of this Bill that Government committee members found to be either counter-intuitive or potentially damaging to the health of our electoral system, aspects of this Bill relating to voluntary voting hold some merit.”
The Senator regards additional votes as a democratic health hazard, and dreams of reducing the franchise on a stage granted for consideration of extending it. But his freelancing gets much weirder:
“Compulsory voting has ensconced a mentality in political parties and Members of Parliament that they must offend the least number of voters… This has had a chilling effect on in-depth, insightful, debates around public policy.”
So an excess of voters is chilling the speech of political parties. So much for taking power back from elites! It is no secret that voluntary voting would disenfranchise the most precarious Australians – so we know whose speech Senator McGrath prefers chilled.
Lest you think these attitudes in Canberra need not directly affect youth policies – Senator McGrath is also the Chair of the Education and Employment Legislation Committee.
Their world, their vote
Young Australians have a greater stake in today’s decisions than anyone else. Their exclusion not only deprives them of an essential liberal right but distorts the platforms the rest of us vote on.
The Young Liberal Movement’s short submission to the inquiry, which opposed the change, admitted that 16- and 17-year-olds number less than 10 per cent of our membership. I suggest we have some outreach to do.
Our job is not to wait for our elders to propose the reforms that will enrich our liberal democracy. Any youth political movement worthy of its name should begin the urgent work to fix both problems: talk to the young, and let them be heard.
Photo credit: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-15/federal-election-2019-pre-polling-and-early-voting/11002874?nw=0
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSW Young Liberal Movement.