Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Voting Age Challenge
In a short judgment issued today te Kōti Mana Nui o Aotearoa (the New Zealand Supreme Court) granted Make It 16 leave to appeal their human rights case to the Supreme Court.
The Court of Appeal has previously decided that preventing 16 and 17 year-olds from voting is age discrimination and that the Governent had not been able to justify that discrimination, but refused to issue a formal declaration of inconsistency with the Bill of Rights. Make It 16 is seeking that declaration from the Supreme Court.
“A formal declaration from the Supreme Court would be a powerful message to Parliament that they should fix this breach of our rights. It would force Parliament and the Government to see this as a priority and boost the movement for change” Make It 16 co-director Cate Tipler (they/them).
“It is very exciting. This means rangatahi will get their day in the Supreme Court. Preventing me and other 16 and 17 year-olds from voting is unjustified age discrimination. It is a breach of the Bill of Rights” says Tipler.
One of the arguments against lowering the voting age to 16 is that teenagers are simply too stupid for democracy, but after the insanity of the Anti-Vaxx Qanon feral lunatics we’ve seen exploding everywhere, I don’t think that argument stacks up any longer.
Adults in NZ believe a microchip is in the vaccine and is spread using 5G technology to bring about a shadowy one world government that uses satanic child sex rings.
Don’t tell me 16 year olds are somehow dumber than that!
Let’s go through the main 3 arguments in the lowering voting age debate.
Taxation without representation:
Taxation without representation is a classic and it has weight. Lots of 16 and 17 year olds have jobs and are paying tax but without any political representation. That is an incredibly powerful argument for Democrats and those arguing against lowering the voting age don’t have much intellectual or philosophical counter weight to this prescient point.
Teenage brains aren’t ready to vote:
One counter is that teenagers frontal lobes haven’t developed enough yet and as such 16 & 17 year olds don’t have the maturity to vote.
While it is certainly true that teens don’t develop frontal lobes until their mid 20s, we are talking about sudden panic moments in young peoples lives like fighting or boy racing or racing off in police pursuits, that criticism can’t be extended to teenagers ability to reason or understand the world around them!
What is the suggestion here? Teenagers will panic at the voting booth and murder everyone in an epic melt down over not being able to take a selfie while voting?
Left only want to lower the voting age for self serving reasons:
The third argument is that this is self serving for the Left. I think that is garbage. Allowing people over 80 to vote leads to very biased results!
Young people are dealing with climate change, allowing them a political voice and by bringing them into politics earlier builds the franchise of democracy no matter who it benefits politically (and I would argue it benefits older people right now)!
Broadening the franchise of Democracy is the goal and allowing our teenagers to have a say would force politicians to listen.
If politicians aren’t going to listen, they won’t get their vote!
What more democratic is that?
I say yes to lowering the voting age to 16 and welcome a new generation of citizens into the great debate that is democracy!
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Have to agree with your comments on the Quanon types. Let’s also not forget the Sheriffs (Ms Crack probably not eligible) There are some ridiculously stupid adults wasting valuable oxygen. You simply can’t say that being 16 or 17 makes you automatically less capable than those idiots.
I knew far more and was way more confident that I was right when I was 17 compared ro now when I’m 67.
Peter H Correcting the Salley Gardens : “ in a field by the river”. Sorry. Older age erroring…
me too(no hashtag) but in retrospect I was a real shithead at 16…now that’s not a reason but people should bear in mind….HJ self explanatory, maos red guards, pol pots murder squads, all young people the fact is the young are prone to fanatical devotion…great when you’re talking about supporting a rock band but maybe beiber like flocking to a ‘fashionable candidate’ isn’t a good thing….and yup older people are prone to these issues too only it’s more pronounced with no experience of ‘shades of grey’ which the world actually is.
Why don’t we just make it 12, or 8, possibly lower?
Off White we don’t tend to employ and tax 12 or 8 year old children
Wheel. Under-age kids do work back shop and front shop in some businesses, esp food and takeaways- and it’s not necessarily a black and white issue, but part of a different and positive cultural and familial ethic; one of my son’s classmate’s families made all the spring rolls for Wellington businesses, sitting at the kitchen table on Saturdays. I watched them.
The kids delivering bumf, thanks I think perhaps to Peter Dunne, are deemed self-employed independent contractors running their own businesses; I had an interesting talk with someone senior from the IRD ‘s Litigation and Adjudication section about this as he thought that it was legally wrong. I think these kids pay WT at source, but have forgotten. I made a submission to a Select Committee about the rorts involved in some of the independent contractor issues 15 or so years ago, but only two of them appeared to be interested.
Fair enough. There is a minimum wage from 16 onwards. You can employ someone under 16 but it’s not legal to do so during school hours or between 10pm and 6am.
And they will be taxed.
Making you 100% wrong wheel.
(Pocket money might be safe though *eye roll)
So what’s stopping moving the age lower into even less developed years? Taxation/representation?
This is just an excuse to skew voting to the left, nothing to do with qanon.
Here’s a question for you and the other PMC drones who are suddenly so concerned at taxation without representation – what do you think a majority of kiwi taxpayers are going to think when their vote is worth less because of their skin color when co governance is further enacted?
Will the government lose legitimacy?
+1 KCC, well put.
Not normally Wheel but a certain person who shall not be named because it’s forbidden to raise the past, brought it in…
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/key-rejects-criticism-of-paperboy-tax/6APB3S2M42R2RSG22GCISAQUGE/
Bert. Off the top of my head, this paperboy issue is what I’m referring to, and unless ( quite possibly) there are really Machiavellian dynamics at play here, I’m not sure if slimey John Key can be credited with this one.
Paper boy/ girls/junk mail deliveries often also involved the extended family. My living room floor would be littered with brochures for stuffing into papers etc, but at least the damn things were delivered, and not tossed over an embankment. My paper daughter’s pay rate was sad, shocking, and unjustifiable exploitation, but kids wanting “ pocket money” willingly do such. I believe that the decision to make them “ independent self- employed contractors running their own businesses,” came from a ruling issued by, I think, Martin Smith from the IRD, and the legislation making this into law was ( I think etc) subsequently put through Parliament by Peter Dunne.
I may be verbose in referring to these exploited young people so lengthily, but I always do so to emphasise the absurdity of suggesting that they are running their own businesses. I remember wondering at the time, how on earth Peter Dunne could reconcile his moral ethos as a practising Catholic, with something so patently wrong – but priests and popes have done worse, and Dunne always seemed a wet little bugger to me.
Yes it was Peter Dunne, Snow White. Key and National backed the legislation through parliament.
Wheel, so you’re saying that voting should depend on employment?
Peter H Back then, we mightn’t have known enough to be unconfident in the way which we may be now …
Down By The Salley Gardens
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the sally gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
W B Yeats
When I was 16 my parents were stupid .It was surprising how smart they were when I got to 20
Trevor does that mean you now want the voting age to be 20 and over?
I have to say my 16 year old son and his mates show way more maturity in terms of choices than I remember when I was the same age (granted its ages ago). If anything they need to lighten up.
let’s be honest here, LINO strategists are banking on the alleged ‘youthquake’ to vote for them..
.just as they pinned their hopes to ‘grateful’ immigrants some of whom considering their cultural backgrounds turn out to be very conservative.
the let 16 vote thing is an attempt to harvest an untapped resource as far as LINO votes go, it’s nothing to do with their ‘suitability’ but that they might be easily conned by shiny aspirational promises well for a few electoral cycles anyway.
and yes the nats would try to pull the same shit if they thought there was even a remote chance of anyone under 40 voting for them.
Why assume if you are 16 or 17 you will vote left ( or slightly less I don’t give a shit about anyone other than me)? People can vote anyway they choose.
6 year olds just want to hear “It’s FREE”. As in FREE this Free that you don’t have to pay. As in lollyscramble. Classic Labour…promise them free stuff. Once you are older you realise that NOTHING in life is free. Especially the so-called free stuff.
Here’s a thought lets not consider giving 6 year olds the vote then
oh c’mon cabbage we let old stale pickled cabbages vote after all.
“ It ‘s free” ? Not really, Cabbage. My six-coming- on-seven year old male relative is learning how to mow lawns so that he can earn his own pocket money. The poor little sod even does it in bare feet. Seven is the age of reason, but seven year olds predicating Parliament would be little different from having Trevor Mallard turning on the sprinklers. And we all know the result of Dame Shipley insisting on lowering the drinking age: carnage on the roads – drunk halfdressed girls stumbling over the roads – profits for immigrant booze barons building mansions.
Sour kraut – I think you’re wrong here. Taking a wee kiddie shopping and having her/it/him produce a little fistful of coins to proudly pay for their own purchase does happen, and it is fun. Try it.
” Sour kraut – I think you’re wrong here. Taking a wee kiddie shopping and having her/it/him produce a little fistful of coins to proudly pay for their own purchase does happen, and it is fun. Try it ”
Yes the excitement in their eyes and the foresight to hand over exactly the right amount and when they are expecting some change back.
You don’t have to assume anything, there are numbers. Though in NZ it seems the so-called Greens are the main beneficiary of this trend, not Labour. Check out this article: https://www.psychology.org.nz/journal-archive/Voter-Sentiment-Demographics-and-Psychological-Correlates-private-2.pdf
They report “Age was negatively associated with intending to vote for the Green Party (b=-1.342, se=.196, OR=.261, z=-6.838, p<.001), showing that Green voters tend to be younger than National Party supporters."
An exacerbating factor in NZ is the ongoing woke makeover of our education system. 16-yrs olds fresh from their indoctrination about systemic racism and toxic masculinity – who do you think most of them are going to vote for?
I don’t assume that but betcha the LINO strategists are banking on it, failing to appreciate you’re not just giving the vote to the hippy drippy children of the bourgoise but to every 16 year old bogan and would be juvenile ‘gangsta’
Top comment, especially regarding the immigrant vote.
Sweet. If the 16/17’s get the vote due to age discrimination the courts have just fixed my dringing n driving issues. My 14yo can get a license so she can come get me when in down thd boozer off my chops.
She currenly drives a range if vehicals far better than many who gaveca license.
Does it occur that qanon antivax ferals might be correct? Could it be that they stand in aligned with a century of child psychologists such as Piaget? Are we going down a path again whefe our desires outbid physical realities?
Taxation without representation: the corollary should also apply. No vote without taxation.
In other words, if you’re not contributing you shouldn’t get a vote.
just so long as you are aware benefits are taxed andrew…
Times may have changed. My experience was while still at high school, when sixteen, I was more interested in having a good time involving beer and girls. The political situation had been stable in that labour or National would govern with first past the post. Times were good, no global warming. It might be true that today’s sixteen year olds are more socially responsible and politically aware. I’m sure some are but just as many couldn’t give a toss. I believe Labour and Jacinda could see the younger voters were needed to help create a mandate for environmental change and have been working towards that. Unfortunately for this Government those would be voters can see for themselves what a failure the last four years have been, and if given the vote are just as likely to vote against them or not vote at all.
I always thought the right to vote came upon attaining the Age of Majority – the ability to enter into a contract, legally imbibe alcohol, etc.
Cmon man we all know the lizard people are injecting microchips into us so that we can be controlled via 5G.
I’ve seen the pictures from the microscope studies.
It’s all true
andy has your regular hospital appointment been cancelled ‘cos numpties won’t wear masks, you should really give em a bell and ask for an urgent consultation.
” I say yes to lowering the voting age to 16 and welcome a new generation of citizens into the great debate that is democracy! ”
Yes but will they vote and do it in in a safe way like turning up at a polling booth as opposed to clicking a preference online ?
I really want to believe they would want to participate but as the stats have always indicated they don’t.
Maybe it’s how you reach them in their own gaming , Netflix environment and their own perceptions around what is really happening ….all sourced through the net.
Maybe there is a possible way through that good old fashioned kiwi apathy that like neo liberalism pervades every next generation.