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2:53 pm, July 27th, 2025 - 25 comments
Categories: democracy under attack, democratic participation, election 2023, elections, political education, Politics -
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There is clear electoral advantage to Labour putting out new policy on younger people voting, as they are about to do in the UK with PM Starmer.
If NZ Labour confine their criticism of the electoral reform bill to enrolment, they miss the opportunity to make politics relevant to younger people.
See: makeit16.org.nz
We need to propose lowering the voting age to 16. When you have such massive ideological swings from super-massive and centralised state under Ardern to super-deregulated and weakened state under Luxon, it gets really hard for young potential voters to believe their vote will change things for them. Give young people proper agency over government.
But they need help to believe.
In an Australian National University Generation study of 3,131 16- and 17-year-old Australians, just 3.5% backed a lowered compulsory vote, 18% wanted a voluntary ballot and more than 70% favoured keeping the voting age at 18. This mirrored past statistics among older voting youth and the overall voting public – highlighting public reluctance for lowering voting age. This lack of confidence isn’t surprising when earlier this year, school students have recorded their lowest civic‑knowledge scores in two decades, and 47% of gen Z voters said their main motivation for casting a ballot in 2022 was avoiding a $20 fine, not civic conviction.
When you get to 16, New Zealanders get most of their rights and a lot of responsibilities already:
That’s a lot of rights and big responsibilities between a person and the state at 16. I’m no longer sure we really still have the right to deny them the full civic participatory step of voting after all that.
But you have to be over 18 to vote or to be a candidate in an election. You can enlist in the Armed Forces at 17, and you can only enter a binding contract like a mortgage at 18.
Not all ages limits have to be aligned. Perfection is the enemy.
Nor do I believe this could only be put in place without some perfect compulsory civics lessons before they should get this voting right. No one from the state taught me how to get married, join a political party, protest, get a mortgage, pay taxes other than a few digital prompts in the last decade, be responsible for obeying the law or indeed engaging with the legal system at all, or how to buy alcohol, or any of that.
Trust young people to think.
If we are to renew the purpose of democracy after this current bunch of old people have had a crack at shrinking it, we need to turn this into something prospective voters can actually hope for: they can make change happen through the vote.
Hey left parties: lower the voting age to 16.
Thanks for this Ad. Yes I agree. Widening the pool of voters is a good thing. Changes to the way we vote and the rules should need a 60% free vote in Parliament imo.
Ardern proposed a (very high) 75% 'parliamentary vote threshold' for making it 16 – perhaps appropriate given this widening of the voter pool would likely be permanent, unlike the on-again off-again partisan tussle over
criminalprisoner voting rights.But abolishing election day voter enrolmemt is a matter simply for our CoC govt
I haven't, yet, found the actual vote on the change in the law that allowed people to enrol on election day but it certainly wasn't required by law to have a 60% vote in the House to introduce it. It only required a simple majority to pass the bill.
If it didn't require a super majority to implement something why should it should be necessary that we should have one repeal it.
The opportunity for same-day (election-day) voter registration was supported by NZ First and implemented for the 2020 general election.
Winston First will now be supporting the abolition of election-day voter registration.
Thank you. You are obviously a great deal better at finding your way around Hansard than I am.
I seemed to find everything about the third reading except the vote.
I would certainly agree with the last bit you quoted from The Spinoff. No party is ever willing to go along with something that they see as possibly favoring some other party at their expense.
I get the argument, but I'm not sure that young people are smarter than old fogies.
America's new Hitler youth talking politics about how the Jews probably did something that made Hitler hate them, and genocide is yukky but it might have been his only option to get rid of a lot of them in a hurry.
https://x.com/Saul_Sadka/status/1948372378481745955
Sane cultures respect elders, because there is understanding and knowledge and yes even wisdom that accrues over a lifetime simple from living a long number of years. Expecting young people to do better than their elders just plays into older people offloading responsibility.
I'm not saying that to argue for not lowering the age, although I remain unconvinced by this post esp the bit about who cares about civics education. The best argument for lowering the age is the opportunity to do civics better in the years before and around voting, so that as time passes the population's understanding of how politics and governance work increases.
I’m saying don’t shit on elders, because we need them too.
we could expand and empower the Youth Parliament as part of a process of getting young people more engaged in politics and as a stepping stone to lowering the age.
I agree about not shitting on elders, and, as far as smarts are concerned, some 'old fogeys' are smarter than some young (16-year-old) people, and some young people are smarter than some 'old fogeys'.
In any case, the voting rights of Kiwis don’t depend on 'smarts', so those suggesting that 16-year-olds aren't 'mature' enough to vote need to be clear about which aspects of 'mature' they believe are relevant to the age threshold of the right to vote.
True, but what I went on to argue is that humans accrue 'smarts' over time simply from having lived year after year (yes, yes, #notallhumans).
There are many very smart young people, lot of different kinds of intelligences too, and we should be supporting them into good understanding of and engagement with governance. I just don't see lowering the age as a one off thing as a good way to do it.
Again, people accrue experience and knowledge by living. That applies to all young and old people irrespective of their cognitive capacity.
And there are young people with intellectual disabilities, are you suggesting they should be capacity tested too?
?? I’m not suggesting (cognitive) capacity testing for the right to vote. I’m OK with the currently accepted position that "the right to vote in parliamentary elections and referendums is a fundamental right in our democratic system. There is no capacity test for voting." Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
sorry. I just didn't follow because of the thing about living means we accrue something that young people don't have. There are differences between young people and older people.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2025/jul/23/britain-is-lowering-the-voting-age-to-16-meanwhile-in-our-colonial-outpost
I'm all down for the respect thing especially as I approach my 'grey whisker years'.
A few observations, attitudes that were ok a few generations ago, are now a blight on society (eg landlording). Also, on experience, 'Shut up and listen to my 60 years experience said the old man. We did and it turned out he had 1 years experience repeated 60 times'. Respect is earned too.
No taxation without representation rings true for me.
right, but that's a issue of individuals, and probably culture. In terms of voting, we're generalising across populations.
As for respect, I think all people deserve a certain amount of respect just because they're a person. Other respect can be earned for sure.
Leave the kids alone ffs , life's long another few years in childhood long hurt
https://www.justice.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Publications/Independent-Electoral-Review-Final-Report-November-2023.pdf
Sections 7.14-7.59 cover voting age. I find Section 7.42 is most pertinent:
nice one. Populations vs individuals.
Great post, well argued.
Rather than "We need to propose lowering the voting age to 16. " I suggest just do it.
The biggest contrast in the last two governments has been the move fast and break things vs incrementalism, politics by polling. The former has more appeal than the latter.
If young people are not allowed to vote until age 18, then they should be exempt from taxes until 18. No taxation without representation as someone, somewhere once said.
It's a nice slogan but struggles with consistency. Migrants on temporary visas can't legally vote, for example, but pay taxes. Everyone pays GST whether they can vote or not.
I'll accept that leftists genuinely believe 16-year-olds are adults when they propose that 16-year-olds are adults for the purposes of the Justice and Corrections systems. Until then, spare us the self-interested blather.
Age lines are drawn in lots of areas because lines are needed somewhere and capacity for one act is not the same as capacity for another. Young people under 18 can be adults for some aspects of the criminal justice system e.g. murder, manslaughter, traffic offences, but society recognises more allowances are needed for younger people as much to minimise conversion to career criminals as anything else.
That's a rather clever way of acknowledging the already huge set of contradictions between the list of things that 16 year olds are allowed to do – marriage, drivers licence, leaving home, not telling your parents what you're doing, etc, etc – and joining the military, getting a mortgage and …. voting.
So perhaps I'm being a bit unfair when I note one huge area of youth decision-making that can affect the rest of their lives, by looking at things like this article about Adolescent brains and crime:
Frankly that argument suggests that we should be restricting some of the things we allow 16 year olds to do, rather than submitting yet another one to their decision-making powers.
In the absence of consistency I'll just have to look for the seeking of political advantage, which appears to be British Labour's aim, given the large number of immigrant youth – although looking at Gen-Z in Western democracies, especially the men, I wouldn't want to bet on the "Youf" vote as the Left have done since the late 60's, especially when you look at videos like the one Weka placed earlier in the thread, and this…
The decision in the UK is been subject to significant wailing from the political right as an attempt to queer the pitch in the favour of the left, but the reality in the UK is this cohort will only increase electorate by around 3-3.5%, I am sure it would be similar numbers here. Young people don't vote as often as older voters and anyway – they are no more ideologically monolithic than any other demographic.
To my mind a strong argument in favour of lowering the voting age is to act as a counter balance to the increasingly geriatric age profile of the voter base as boomers work their way through to retirement. Rory Stewart mentioned in "The Rest is Politics" that the median age in Nigeria is 16; in Japan it is 50. In NZ it is 37.5 whereas in 1964-1975 at the height of the boomer babies it was 24-25.
Next up would be a move to cap the voting age at life expectancy, that is at 82.
Lowering the voting age and capping the voting age would hopefully restore some dynamism to our civic discourse, which is currently dominated by increasingly sclerotic collective neuroses of an aging population.
Good post Ad. I did see you linked
As first link. That was very respectful of you. I am sure they would appreciate that.
I have read their pages and all…this comment (I italicised) stood out.
Andrew Becroft ( a NZer i greatly respect) among many others who support Vote:16
I had put my personal thoughts on Open Mike…
Some Old people hate? dislike? maybe even fear, the Young ? Been the same since Adam and Eve : )
Its coming. Their time. Best get used to it.