16-Year-Olds Can Drive And Pay Tax: Should They Be Allowed To Vote?
It's time.
He’s Australia’s youngest senator, and he wants to give young people the right to vote: The Greens’ Jordon Steele-John has announced plans to introduce a bill that lowers the voting age from 18 to 16.
The 23-year-old said that young people were capable enough to vote on political matters.
Lowering the voting age to 16 in #auspol
Also, let’s lower the cabinet age; currently it’s almost 50 ??♂️
— Senator Jordon Steele-John (@Jordonsteele) April 23, 2018
“It’s frustrating to me that young people aged 16 can work full time, drive cars, pay taxes, make choices about our future and the world around us and yet don’t get a seat at the table in making those decisions,” a statement released by the senator said.
“Quite frankly, some of the conversations I’ve had in classrooms across WA have beaten the crap out of some of the discourse in Canberra. The Greens are of one voice, obviously, on this matter but Labor has also indicated in the past that they would be interested in seeing this reform come to fruition.”
Bill Shorten’s Labor party called for the voting age to be lowered to 16 back in 2015, but they are yet to announce whether they back the Greens’ new policy.
We supports today’s announcement @Jordonsteele Bill to lower Australia’s voting age to 16. It will add 580,000 new voters & give politicians incentive to consider how the decision they make directly affect young people and their futures #Auspol #ausyouth pic.twitter.com/GrwRWfFbQG
— AYAC (@AYAC_) April 23, 2018
Political science professor Ian McAllister conducted a study back in 2012 as part of the Australian Electoral Commission’s Electoral Research Forum which doubted the policy’s value.
“There’s no evidence that lowering the voting age would increase political participation; indeed, the evidence points in the opposite direction,” the paper reads. “And despite the rapid expansion of university education, young people are no more politically knowledgeable today than they were in the past”.
Some recent evidence challenges this idea. In 2014, when Scotland held a vote to determine whether they should become independent, 75 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds turned out and voted.
But it’s hard to tell whether that would be true in Australia — especially considering that the proposed bill would only make voting voluntary for those below the age of 18.
The move would put almost 600,000 new voters on the electoral roll.