Hygro
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Voting Age 16?
- Thread starter Zardnaar
- Start date
Zardnaar
Deity
NZ was kinda used as a social laboratory in the good old days. Things like letting women vote, pensions, social welfare were tested here and trickled up to Aussie and UK.
Australian Murdoch media likes burying Jacinda I've noticed and they're behind in the polls.
I don't think it's gonna happen but it enters the conversation.
E.man
King
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2021
- Messages
- 649
Yes, I have noticed NZ moving along in directions, suiting themselves, on issues.
A river was awarded rights under the law for example, which then leads to the idea elsewhere.
AU 'cookers ' were trying to make out that Jacinda was a 'Socialist Dictator ' on a video confetti I saw. I don't expect them to understand Social Democracy even living in one.
How will the NZ housing and cost of living impact on govt support?
Zardnaar
Deity
Might sink the current government. They were elected on fixing it and made it worse or at least are getting blamed for it.
House prices went up 20% in 2820/21. What the rest of the world is experiencing was an issue here 2017. Turns out highest population growth rate in OECD is unsustainable.
Covid bailout essentially put billions in the pockets of landlords and employer's. No helicopter money like USA.
Health systems starting to crumble as well. High cost of living, comparatively low wages visa free travel to Australia.
Not that the right will fix anything something's gonna break or change in next decade or so.
Current government can only really react and tinker they're fairly useless at doing much of anything. If they go next year the incoming one will be good at doing stuff it's just that stuff won't be good.
Shockingly they seemed to have noticed Liz Truss fate and are not doing their tax cut plan.
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2012
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- 952
The voting age is largely irrelevant to me, but instead I want to focus on this part:
"This week's Supreme Court judgment on lowering New Zealand's legal voting age has, at times, been interpreted as some kind of mandate for change. That's not quite the case, but the court's ruling does at least make change a possibility.
What the court has done is accept the claims made by members of the Make It 16 campaign that the current voting age limit of 18 is inconsistent with section 19 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Essentially, it found, preventing 16- and 17-year-olds from voting discriminates against them on the basis of their age."
what is it that this court said, exactly? I can't say I know very much about the courts in NZ. Does anyone have a link?
personally I find it odd that an 18 year old voting but not a 16 year old is "discrimination".
like, you can't wait two years to finally not be "discriminated against"? It's two years...What, is the nation breathlessly awaiting your answer all to the world's problems, Mister Sixteen-Year-Old?
"This week's Supreme Court judgment on lowering New Zealand's legal voting age has, at times, been interpreted as some kind of mandate for change. That's not quite the case, but the court's ruling does at least make change a possibility.
What the court has done is accept the claims made by members of the Make It 16 campaign that the current voting age limit of 18 is inconsistent with section 19 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Essentially, it found, preventing 16- and 17-year-olds from voting discriminates against them on the basis of their age."
what is it that this court said, exactly? I can't say I know very much about the courts in NZ. Does anyone have a link?
personally I find it odd that an 18 year old voting but not a 16 year old is "discrimination".
like, you can't wait two years to finally not be "discriminated against"? It's two years...What, is the nation breathlessly awaiting your answer all to the world's problems, Mister Sixteen-Year-Old?
Zardnaar
Deity
Essentially they're arguing any type of age restriction is discrimination.
In reality they just have to justify the restriction. That justification might just be "to young".
There's a BUT clause in our Bill of Rights/Human rights act.
Essentially they're taking an American style approach to the law but NZ courts are bigger on the spirit of the law and tend to look to parliament if they conflict.
It's not a 16 year old can vote but raising the question "should 16 year olds vote".
What I expect is it will go to a referendum and it gets soundly defeated and the polititians shrug their shoulders in 4-5 years time.
Referendums here are basically an official poll not binding on MPs.
As pointed out in the Rick Mercer videos I posted earlier, post-secondary education is an important political issue that often goes ignored because the politicians have usually not given a damn about the barriers they put in place to make voting harder for college/university students. It's a vicious circle of "no, we won't make it easier for them by having on-campus polling stations" to "why bother with the students' views on tuition and programs and jobs? They don't vote."
This does and should matter to 16-year-olds, because some people do graduate high school at that age. I did. Instead of trying to find a job that someone would hire a 16-year-old for, I opted to do a 4th year of high school to improve my grades in the lab sciences, take a couple of optional classes I wanted to but hadn't had time for previously, and the rest of my time was divided among working in the library, studying for those very important lab science tests to get the grades I needed to have a better chance to be accepted at RDC, and put in a 4th year of working on the yearbook as a typist, and an editor and typist for the poetry club. I had far more credits than I needed, but at least I had the important stuff in the right classes. That fall (1981) was my first year of college (I'd graduated high school in 1980), and tuition was being discussed. It was in the news. It mattered, and 42 years later it still does. And the politicians still don't care.
You realize that there are many adults who couldn't pass that?
Age discrimination is defined in the NZ human rights act as potentially existing when policies and rules are applied differently based on age from anywhere 16 and up.
So it was a fairly simple question of whether this applied to voting age, which it kinda obviously does, and then whether it was justified to discriminate in this fashion on some other allowable grounds (the way some health based restrictions on certain substances can apply, for instance). Justifications which they couldn't find, since as we've hashed out in this thread, there's already some high quality democracies with a voting age of 16, and there's not really any good defence of 18 as the threshold beyond status quo bias.
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Zardnaar
Deity
You forgot an imho on that.
No one's actually established 16 is actually a good idea.
The argument they're using can also be applied to any type of age limit eg alcohol purchases (18), drivers license (16 was 15), retirement age (65).
All they've established is it's worth looking at and they need to justify it if they keep it at 18.
Last poll (2020 iirc) 85% are against it current polling Jacina is out next year and the incoming parties are opposed to it.
At the earliest it will be a referendum in 2024 election. Labour will likely lose then if they don't lose next year.
Assuming it passes the referendum if the opposition digs in you're looking at 2010 at the earliest if not 2016. We haven't had a two term government since 1990.
I doubt it will pass a referendum next year. They'll make up some excuse and bury it.
If Polling is against it Jacinda backs down she's basically a populist. Think it was two days ago one of their policies crashed and burned must be election coming up.
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As Valka said, and as I've already said previously, there are plenty of adults that wouldn't like or benefit from this kind of gatekeeping.
Zardnaar
Deity
Can't see or schools being able to do that efficiently. They've kinda gone to crap since 1999 apparently.
18 is legal age for adult here and also for contract law.
Moriarte
Immortal
- Joined
- May 10, 2012
- Messages
- 2,687
Sure, I realise. But I wasn’t offering to test adults. Just a thought crossed my mind about the healthy spirit of competition between the young. Whoever gets to vote earlier by passing a test is the cool kid. As the chess scene shows, there are some very capable young people even at age 10.
Doesn't matter what you were offering, the point is arbitrary standards (which is what ruling on political understanding is when based solely on age) are discriminatory by default. If someone is 30 and couldn't pass the test, but gets to vote anyway, what's the difference between them and a 16 year old?
Also if your go-to about being cool involves the chess scene, I'm not sure you remember school well enough to be talking about coolness
(I mean this in a friendly way, from someone who was on my school's chess team)
Akka
Moody old mage.
TBH, I'd actually rather have a three-steps majority treshold and in fact make it farther than 18.
Something like :
0-13 are considered "minors" and are legally not responsible.
14-19 are considered "teenagers" and are allowed to drink, manage their finance, have sex and so on, but aren't fully adults.
20+ are actual adults with all rights and responsibilities.
Researchs seem to confirm that the brain isn't fully grown until 25, and we all colloquially know that someone around 20 is still young and impulsive enough to make pretty big mistakes. It's clearly a bad idea to lower even more majority age.
Something like :
0-13 are considered "minors" and are legally not responsible.
14-19 are considered "teenagers" and are allowed to drink, manage their finance, have sex and so on, but aren't fully adults.
20+ are actual adults with all rights and responsibilities.
Researchs seem to confirm that the brain isn't fully grown until 25, and we all colloquially know that someone around 20 is still young and impulsive enough to make pretty big mistakes. It's clearly a bad idea to lower even more majority age.
Gatekeeping can and will always be abused to restrict voting in excess of whatever noble intentions people had in setting a limit in the first place.
People can be idiots, can be politically ill-informed, and generally vote against their interests at any stage in their life. Suggesting that teenagers can't vote because of these same reasons that plenty of other people fall foul of seems unfair on the face of it, regardless of what is considered a fully-grown brain. What's next, do we start banning smokers from voting? Or some other thing that has an impact on the brain? Full-contact sports hobbyists and professionals?
Akka
Moody old mage.
Okay, let's toddlers vote, drink and have sex then.
Also make them liable to be conscripted and allowed to drive, sign checks, buy and handle guns.
We should not discriminate on the basis of age anymore !
Lots of adults would probably fail that too.
You know you've got a winning argument about teenagers having the right to vote when you're pulling an argument to absurdity that involves giving toddlers guns and alcohol.
