The politics of a lower voting age

The summits are hassle but for many it's a ride of passage, voting in the first election after you turn 18. You do your research, maybe ask your parents what they think, then maybe you do the complete opposite. Then you head down to your local polling booth which is possibly the first time you've set for inner primary school since you've finished your six. You line up, nervous with anticipation, and a little bit worried your stuff up and then accidentally elect one of the quirky independents, his platform you can't abide. Your hand at the little lower house sheep and the giant unmanageable senate ballot. You go to the Cardboard booth to make your selection, then on the way out you treat yourself to a democracy sausage. Voting is a simple enough process that only happens every couple of years. It is much less complicated or dangerous than driving a car, but in Australia you can start driving when you're 16. Two whole years before you can vote. When I started out ginger I thought obviously have you ever met 16 year old I used to be in England. Professor Lisa Hill from the School of Social Sciences at the University of Adelaide has heard all of the arguments against lowering the voting age. A lot of them say won't make any difference so lazy they won't turn out. But we know from experiments and studies else where 16 is 17 year olds will turn out in high numbers than 18 to 24 year olds. So that's not true. They say that the young lack the political maturity and competence to vote. There's been a lot of testing on this and they're just as morally mature and able to do it as someone a bit older. Young aren't very good on decisions to do with hot cognition where there's maybe alcohol involved or peer pressure involved or excitement involved but in these sort of testy type situations like voting they're just as good. We also know from a study done in Gantt that in Belgium that young people are just as capable of casting a congruent vote as an older person meaning a vote that's consistent with their express preferences. People say that their bad decisions will be visited on themselves or they do mad things like low of the age of consent abolish bed times abolish controls on the internet and that's just a bit silly because good remember they've got to get past the parliament. After reading widely and researching thoroughly Lisa reached this conclusion. I couldn't see one reason not to enfranchise 16, 17 year olds. This is seriously social. I'm DJ Gorman speaking to you from none of our country and we are back for another season to delve into the social sciences and see what they can tell us about ourselves and the people around us. Today on the podcast should we lower the voting age so that the next generation can have it say sooner and if we do just how low should we go? I just think that giving young people the vote is going to give them so much more power and to have an actual say in so many issues basically all of my friends have jobs and many of them actually do pay taxes and yet we don't get a say on where this money goes. May and Farmer is 17 and like a lot of her peers she cares deeply about social issues. There are so many issues affecting society that do not exclude young people and moving the power to actually have a say in how these issues impact them is just so so detrimental. I mean me personally I'm worried about many issues from climate change to the like housing crisis with inflation and prices going up. In fact I think there are so many issues that actually affect young people even more than they do adults. John Wall asks us to conduct a thought experiment in ourselves and say look what if I was to say to you that we will raise the voting age to 50 for everyone how do you feel about that and automatically we all bristle at that and he says well that's that's how it feels for younger people you shouldn't have to wait to get representation if you want it. For all of the reasons Professor Lisa Hill and Mayor Farmer have outlined Lisa believes the voting age should be lowered to 16 and importantly she believes it should be compulsory from 16. According to the condosate theorem which is supported by empirical data the more people you in you franchise the better the decisions become and I've done some work on that about compulsory voting regimes and it does seem like somehow along the line the inclusion of more people leads to better governance. Governors govern better but why 16 why not 13 or 12 why not six how young is too young to participate in democracy you know sometimes I see arguments in the literature people say that you should have a vote from age zero and your parents should have a proxy vote for you which I'm not in favour of some say 12 because 12 is where you start to show the moral maturity of an adult in these cold cognition settings I say 16 to 17 because this is consistent with a lot a lot of other obligations and allowances we have in our society such as the age of consent or age of being out of mario or have a child or the 17 you can join the military 16 to 17 year olds can give blood change their name all kinds of other things or be tried as an adult so 16 to 17 sounds fine to me 16 but it is a bit arbitrary because people at 14 and three quarters can get a job and start playing taxes but then they're not allowed to vote with what's done with their money I know it is arbitrary you're right the anyway we can solve it is to have it from zero but then I worry this is just multiplying the voting power of parents with a lot of children and this I can see some merit in that but on the other hand it really concerns me and you've got 10 year olds being put in adult prisons in Australia so then there's an argument about is that fair that they are essentially subject to adult laws but have no franchise precisely so yes it is arbitrary and I don't know how to solve this problem either you do it in an absolutious way by starting it at zero or just you could just say look 16 to 17 year old that's where the what the public will accept so maybe this is just got to be a strategic decision they probably can't accept 12 year olds I'd always assumed politicians were the most resistant to lowering the voting age because younger voters might be less willing to vote for the establishment but in fact Lisa says it's the general public who need more convincing well a lot of the time it's parents that have had them just had the most irrational conversation with their teenager that you know has ever been heard and they don't think that you wouldn't have the moral maturity but I think part of it is also because voting is a form of power and it means someone else will be getting when you share it it means you're going to be sharing power and people naturally bulk it if they don't even realise they're doing it they don't want to share power but societies are healthier where power has shared we know that they're more stable they're happier where there's more equality there is a real equity argument here isn't there where young people are subject to so many decisions about their lives in various different quarters and yet essentially treated as if they're not full citizens or full persons and there was a study done on climate anxiety globally and all that the young people interviewed have tremendous levels of anxiety and the thing that I found really sad was they feel guilty that their older generations are ruining the planet and they have to just stand by and watch it and then inherit it so they have feelings of betrayal and anger and guilt now we all know that young people aren't very happy now they're more anxious and worried than they ever were because the world is more frightening 75% of that that that large study 75% of the kids in that study said they found the future very frightening the idea of the future very frightening that is awful this will give them some stake in it and some say over it and it would allow their feelings of guilt at not doing anything and it would allow their feelings of being betrayed by older generations as well so you're arguing that if those younger people could vote that would give them a way to solve or at least attempt to address their climate anxieties exactly it would give them actual power to do something about it but it would allow it would be a really good measure towards mental health and also it's a kind of class anger as well and so that's not good for the society it's good in a million different ways but it would also but it would also allow their anxieties that aren't based in their imaginations the world is going to hell and they would like to do something about it so and they also the other thing they're really worried about is their financial insecurity too voting is in every way a human right and there's completely no reason why young people should be denied this right to vote I become so much more interested in what is actually going on in society than I was say five years ago and I think if young people would have been very early up then this will sort of replicate and people are going to be more interested in society, more interested in what's actually happening. And I really don't see any reason why that is a negative instead of a positive. So you say that young people should be able to vote. When do you wish you could have started to vote? I wish I could have started even before turning 16 years old. I think personally that being 13 years old is the perfect time to be given the vote. I mean it's when we start to become more independent. We're off to high school. We have greater access to resources that we can use to educate ourselves. You mentioned the age 13 there and I can imagine some of our listeners gasping and thinking 13 year olds are erratic, they're not mature enough, they're not across the issues enough and perhaps even that they should be given a chance to have childhoods be able to play. They're simply not old enough to have that big responsibility of voting. How would you respond to people who might think that way? Yeah, there's so much to unpack here. So I think I'll just start with the idea of how important it is to have a childhood. I completely agree but voting is not going to take away from that. It's just going to mean you're a little bit more interested in how society works and look the actual vote itself that takes less than a morning. I think also there's a really important consideration that if there's a younger age restriction so that it is currently people under 18 years old are allowed to vote. And it doesn't make sense that you know there isn't say for example like an older age restriction. I mean like obviously I'm kind of very much against very age restrictions in total but it is very hypocritical but you know elderly people are allowed to vote and when young people aren't considering that under so many people who are affected by biases in the media like both young and old so it just doesn't make sense to place all of the blame on young people when young people being given the vote are going to actually be taking a more you know serious role in society and ultimately give you know so much more back to society and reap so much more from society because they are going to have an impact in the issues that matter and matter to them instead of just allowing adults to make all the decisions. There's another big question that we have to tackle if we want to talk about 13 year olds voting and that's political advertising. It's hard enough as an adult to trust the messages that Polly's put out there when they are desperate for your vote. How would they approach marketing to children and in the age of the influencer who could possibly police the ethics of that. His professor leaves a hill again. We can educate children in school to know how to be citizens and to know how to be critical about in the consumption of political news and we're already doing that a little bit in schools in a way that it wasn't done for my generation. The other thing I've been working on is truth and political advertising so that's what been when the projects I worked on last year devising a legal regime to control all the lies and disinformation and conspiracy theories that are eroding our political culture so laws like that could help but we can just we can teach people to be critical subjects I hope but we're all victim to it. 70% of adults in a recent study it was a very big study we're rated overconfident of their ability to tell fake from real news so everyone is probably over confident everyone is probably a little bit incompetent so we all need to learn that not just kids they might even be more savvy about it actually in being able to spot fake stuff from from real stuff and I wonder if we lowered the voting ages well whether education in schools around politics would actually get stronger I think it would and it's you've got a kind of a captive audience there too in the way that you have it with the general public so you could really train them to be super citizens and super competent citizens as well and and and another thing with Birmingham mind a lot people don't know this about Australians but people in compulsory voting regimes actually already are more sophisticated than people in voluntary regimes so they're we're already ahead of the game but we could polish it up a bit with some thoughtful curricula and it's also one of those things where your kid comes home and tells you something they've learned it's cool and you think oh I didn't know that yeah I know if young people aren't equipped to vote what makes turning the magical age of 18 you know sunny equipping them to vote every election so so many adults throw away their votes and so are so many adults to come to you know the advertising campaigning the politicians throw out in a desperate bid to secure votes for themselves and you know what if people are going to argue that young people aren't equipped to vote because they don't understand how they don't understand parliamentary processes I think that argument could be perfectly also fitted towards older people so there's no question mayor will enroll to vote if she hasn't already but despite her enthusiasm a lot of people aren't championed a bit to cast their vote the moment they're legal the overall population about 90% of enrolled voters will tend to vote in any given election sometimes going as high as 95 but lately around 90 of young people it's hard to model it but we think it's around 77% or less so that intellectual studies that's a huge gap and intellectual studies gap that's significant it's like four percentage points so to have that many percentage points between two social groups is really big it's important not to hear those figures and then assume it's a failure of the youth young people think of voting as the things their parents do they look at politicians it doesn't look like anyone they know they don't feel that they'll be represented politicians don't represent them they do more alternative non arena we would call it activities such as click-tivism which some people call slack-tivism they're much more narrow in their interests so they're not interested in politics broadly they'll be interested in one or two things this is very different from older generations and that's one of the reasons why they don't join political parties so they don't get energized being a member of a political party is one of the most important correlates of propensity to vote so there's a lot of things feeding into it but they just parliamentary politics and electoral politics don't resonate with them they need to get connected back in there this is really interesting Lisa because someone like me sees it as a duty to vote and I actually get quite excited on election day this cohort you're talking about does not see it as a duty to society somehow no it's really interesting and that is the norm in Australia more so than in any other country anywhere ginger Australians are more likely than anyone in the democratic world to say that voting is a duty and we consider it both the right and a duty and it is a duty under law it's required younger people tend to think that more is a right but not a duty so this is kind of a generational shift so why aren't 18 year olds as keen on voting as Australians in other age groups it's young people inhabit a more individualised rights world than old generations we've always seen things in terms of the bigger picture any each other and what we might owe to each other a younger people tend to see things more in terms of individual rights and freedoms older Australians need to think of things more in terms of you know of course I think of their own rights and their own needs but they think of their obligations to others as well is this assessment really fair though are we falling into the trap of blaming kids these days for having exactly the same attitudes about the world that we had when we were their age I guess we just have to remind ourselves that not all young people are alike but Lisa has this message for the ones who have yet to enroll to vote I wish young people understood and they would join the dots which is a direct lie between their failure to be engaged electrically and the way they're being screwed by older generations so right now the fact that the electorate is older and the fact that it's true in Australia as it's true anywhere else the politicians know who their customers are and if you're not one of their customers they will not serve you so they know their customers are older so they design policies that benefit these older generations and they ignore the young the young are poorer than they ever were their jobs are more insecure their chances of owning a home are getting smaller and smaller and smaller everything about their life is worse than it was for my generation they're shrinking themselves as an electorate and because of slowing birth rates they're naturally shrinking so their power electorally is shrinking anyway so they really need to get their dukes up in roll and vote so they can get some representation in parliament if we actually did this if we followed in the footsteps of countries like New Zealand Scotland and Brazil and lowered the voting age to 16 should it be compulsory or voluntary everyone wants the right but they don't want the duty that the rest of us have in Australia it's a duty right so that's how it's got to be democracy requires work we all have to pitch in. And it can't be just some or not the other. The other problem here is it would be a thin edge of the wedge on compulsory voting. And it would create confusion about whether voting really was compulsory. If people got the idea at the beginning, so your voting habits are entrenched the first time you're in franchised. And so people will get the idea too early that it is voluntary. But the main reason it makes me unhappy to think about that is that it would only entrench the kind of inequalities we already have in Australia, and which voluntary systems have. Now, voluntary systems, we can choose not to vote. The people that end up voting are the well-off. The white people, the people with a house, people that have lived their all their lives, the people that speak the dominant language, people with money, people who are educated, these are the people that vote. And the people that are poor and disadvantaged and don't speak the dominant language and all that other stuff. They're the ones that tend to, like, people who are homeless, people that have disabilities, all kinds of things unemployed, they'll tend not to vote. Now, they're the very people that need to vote to get the protection that I know for a fact, voting can give you economically and socially. We've got inequalities here, and it would only entrench them earlier. So, in order to avoid that greater evil of entrenching inequality even further in this country, everyone should be required to vote. Thanks for listening to Seriously Social IMG Dickorman. This podcast is produced on Nanowall, Yagura and Terrible Land, and we pay our respects to elders past and present. Seriously Social is produced by Kim Leicester, engineered by Mark Gargaldon, AKA Baldi, and our executive producers are Bonnie Johnson and Claire McHugh. It's an initiative of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Next time on Seriously Social, what drives people into poverty? Nobody plans to be poor, so what are the causes? And more importantly, how can we band together and bring about change? See you then. (upbeat music)