https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-04/push-to-lower-compulsory-voting-age-in-australia-to-16/103662980
Sixteen-year-olds can learn to drive, get a job, pay taxes and be on the Organ Donor Register, but they are considered too young to vote. Should they also have a stake in deciding their future?
An action to make society more democratic is one I can get behind. Few countries can really call themselves democratic.
So long as we have elected "representatives" we are not a democracy in the true sense of the word
Direct democracy is the only real democracy.
“But but you’ll get tyranny of the majority, which clearly doesn’t happen when the majority elect a tyrannical representative”
Are the lobbyists going to bribe us all to vote for their corporate interests over our own? You can buy out a “mate” you can’t buy out 26 million individuals.
What we will get is not having to pick a pollie who only aligns with 2 out of 2000 of our views. We won’t have politicians afraid to take action because they fear losing voters.
I have to say, the more I think about it, the more I genuinely think Thor Prohaska—a recurring independent candidate for Dickson (Peter Dutton's seat) and Kurwongbah (the state seat around the same area)—might have the right idea. He has an extremely detailed explanation for how it would work, but the short of his plan is that your MP would vote on any particular issue precisely how a majority of residents vote on the issue. But local residents could nominate some other local resident to be their proxy either overall, or for specific issues, alleviating the need for every voter to keep up-to-date and educated on every single issue, if there's someone else they trust who can do that for them—while still being able to pull away that trust at literally any moment, or to simply vote directly for an issue that they are particularly passionate about, or if there's one issue where they disagree with their chosen proxy.
Or we could cut out the middle man and just vote or not vote ourselves on issues as we see fit?
That's how you get an America-like situation where the goal isn't to come up with policies the most people agree with, but to find ways to get the people who already agree with you to turn out to vote, and to dissuade people who disagree with you from voting.
It's a brilliant way to empower NIMBYs even more than they already are.
Okay so make it mandatory with a “no opinion” option for those who are not concerned on issues.
We don’t actually need to have an individual opinion on every topic, nor would everyone care about everything. Let’s empower people to make their own choices for once.
make it mandatory
There are an average of two divisions every single day Parliament sits. And that's without counting votes that are determined on the voices. Or issues at the state and local council levels. Federally, there are about 200 Bills introduced every single year. There's not necessarily anything wrong with enabling people to vote on all of them if they want to, but making it mandatory is a ludicrous proposition. Enabling people to choose a proxy is not just a good idea, it's a necessity to do large-scale direct democracy.
While I agree that direct democracy is the only real democracy, history has shown that direct democracy can only really be achieved in small communities, otherwise you run into various problems.
Referendums are notable examples of a direct democracy in action, however they can only really work with simple yes or no questions as more complex questions usually don't work (as voter turn out becomes abysmal).
There are ways it could get close to working, but it really becomes more like continuous representative democracy.
For example, you could set things up so that instead of having a fixed size parliament, you have a virtual parliament that can have participation by every voter if they like to vote on the bills. Then, you allow people to revocably grant and revoke delegations of their vote to someone else. You have some laws around delegations - you can't coerce people to give you their delegation, and as a recipient of a delegation, you only get to know how many people delegated to you, not who. People get to choose whether they will accept incoming delegations - but if they accept them, their vote on issues is public (otherwise secret). People accepting delegations also need to declare minor conflicts of interest, and avoid major ones entirely. You can't accept money for a delegation - although if you get enough the government will pay you for having enough delegations and actively exercising those delegations. Unlike voting, people can revoke their delegation at any time, and either vote on issues themselves, or re-delegate. Missing too many issues votes without having appointed a delegate could lead to a warning and eventually a fine.
The biggest issue then becomes how to avoid spamming too many bills in a potentially huge virtual parliament - either because it is a fringe issue, or as a filibuster. This could be worked around by having a maximum number of bills per day to vote on (potentially voted on regularly to set), and letting voters optionally rank one or more bills they'd like to progress - which run against each other in proportional voting to select the slate of bills to go to a vote. Voters would not need to read every possible bill, and could discuss outside the voting system to encourage each other to support a particular bill making it to the agenda. A similar mechanism could limit amendment proposals to bills to be voted on.
The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)
Representative democracy is a form of democracy. Direct democracy is another form. There's no "true" form.
In theory yes, in practice no. There is clearly a class difference between politicians and those whom they "represent".
I mean it's possible to have more representative representatives. It's not an inherent thing in representative democracy that the representatives are wealthier.
16 years olds are pretty impressionable. I know I was. Wouldn't this kind of change make them more vulnerable to election manipulation?
lol, have you ever asked a 16 year old how they're feeling? then waited 30 minutes and asked them again?
Austria, Brazil, Germany, and the UK region of Scotland (for devolved parliament and council elections only) have already enfranchised 16-year-olds. We should too.
There's currently a Parliamentary Inquiry into civics education, engagement, and participation in Australia. Changing the voting age is not in its terms of reference, but a large enough number of submissions calling for that could at least get a broader national conversation started.
(I also plan to put into my submission something about other voting systems and how feeling like your vote actually matters in a way that it largely doesn't in IRV would be a big help for civic engagement.)
Sounds good. I'm interested in why you think your vote doesn't matter in IRV? And what system you'd replace it with
So, it's obviously a relative thing. Your vote matters a shit tonne more in IRV than in FPTP, of course.
But it's also a lot less than proportional systems. At the last federal election, over 12% of Australians wanted a Greens representative. Less than 3% actually got one.
A combined 9% wanted One Nation and United Australia Party. They got 0. Labor got 51% of seats, from less than 33% of votes. The LNP is actually the most fairly-represented party, getting 39% of seats from 36% of votes.
My preference is a proportional system. Probably MMP, to keep local representation, as well as to remove the need for party lists. Rather than the proportional seats being done in party order, I'd do them in "nearest loser" order based on their local races. But that's a very niche aspect. The important thing is that it be some form of proportional representation.
A counter-argument could be that our Senate uses STV, which is quasi-proportional. Which is certainly a good thing, and far better than if we didn't have it. But it's still only a rough approximation of proportionality. Labor and the LNP each won 39% of seats, from their 30% and 34% of votes. That equates to 3 or 4 seats too many for Labor, and 1 or 2 too many for the LNP.
But even if it did work perfectly, the fact is that all the attention and most of the power is in the House of Representatives. It can be very disheartening and discouraging for someone engaged politically who doesn't support Labor or the LNP to know that the chances that the candidate they give their vote to will probably not actually get in, and that's not good for civic engagement.
I thought you'd be thinking of MMP - that nearest loser sounds interesting! It does seem to be the road to better representation.
I'm all for change - I think it'd need to be accompanied with plenty of education in the form of AEC ads on tv and online. Not so much the 'how to vote' but more the 'how our system works'. Plenty of people I talk to have no idea about IRV, and consider voting for anything other than libs or Labor "throwing your vote" - which it can totally not be if people are aware of how it works.
Current system gives all regions some chance to have a voice. Otherwise only interests of cities will be considered and interests of outback will not be represented at all.
MMP gives people local representation while still making sure a party with 30% of voters' support doesn't win 51% of seats, resulting in 100% of power.
Haha sorry! I'm a big supporter of Scotland having another independence referendum, especially with EU membership being one of the big points in the "remain" camp in 2014. But for now, well, Scotland is a region of the UK, and that's a point I really wanted to emphasise to make it clear that it's not something allowed by Westminster.
That's already how it works. You never have to register to vote; you can spend you're entire life opting out of the electoral system.
But when you register to vote you've accepted your civic duty to cast your vote everytime. So 16-year-olds would just have the option of starting earlier.
I've gone back and forth on this. I definitely think they should have the option to vote, but I'm not sure whether it should be compulsory or not.
The main problem I have with making it purely optional is that if you didn't, that could create a sort of smaller-scale American-style campaign where the goal isn't to make the best case, but to make your campaign about encouraging your supporters to vote and discouraging those who disagree from voting. Obviously they'd only be doing that for 16 & 17 year-olds, but that could potentially still be a problem. I don't want politicians to have any more incentive than they already do to run shitty negative inflammatory campaigns.
Another potential problem is around voter education. People are really dumb. So many people already have problems understanding how our voting system works. We want to send out a message that's as simple as possible. "Everyone has to vote" is a much simpler message than "16 & 17 year-olds can vote if they want, people aged 18+ must vote."
I don't support giving a 16 year old that we literally do not trust to drive voting rights. Sorry not sorry. You all know damn well 16 year olds are a goddamn pile of running hormones with no real life experience.
Again, you don't trust this person to give sexual consent but they can make policy?
And yes they are exceptions and adults dumb as rocks, it doesn't mean you should add more clueless teens to the mix. Now don't at me and get off my lawn.
We do trust 16 year olds to begin learning to drive though.
I would be completely open to the idea that at 16 you have the right and option to vote, but voting is not compulsory until you turn 18.
That way 16 year olds who aren't interested or ready or comfortable placing a vote don't have to, but those that are already politically active, interested and informed about voting can do so.
Across the whole there really isn't that much developmental difference between 16 and 18, there's a pretty big cross over between the more "responsible" 16 year olds and the "irresponsible" 18 year olds. I know that's not really an argument, but the fact is that many 16 year olds are just as informed, and just as responsible as the rest of the voting public.
Many 16 year olds work and pay taxes, they study in an education system managed by the department, they can begin joining the army, they might be looking at university and signing on for HECS debt before they turn 18 depending on their birth month. These are systems built on policies by parties that these young people had no say in, and it directly effects them.
And yet if we asked should 16 year olds be allowed to consent to sexual activity we would get a resounding no. We feel that they are not capable of handling sex but can make policy?
I'm sorry, I feel for young people and I do my best to vote for my daughter, but having literal children ain't going to fix shit IMO. Probably just have kids voting down parental voting lines anyways. Like family members won't pressure them.
Again I emphasize but this isn't the way.
??? I thought age of consent in Australia was 16?
...just checked depends on the state but uh... Yeah we do let some 16yo decide if they want to have sex. 🤷🏻♀️
So I was unaware, and I guess that's their choice to make. I'm not sure I'm okay with saying it's okay for an adult to have sex with a 16 year old but that's their choice I guess.
I trust politically interested 16-year-olds more than I do politically apathetic septuagenarians.
you don't trust this person to give sexual consent
Umm, age of consent in at least most of Australia (I only checked the 3 most populous states, and all of them matched) is 16.
From what I've seen of adults, I have no reason to believe the average adult is any more aware or any less susceptible to lies than 16 year-olds.
Compulsory is such a good system. It doesn't take long. It's on a weekend so it's not inconvenient. You get a sausage at the sausage sizzle and you do your vote. There's a real holiday atmosphere. And it produces much more representative results. Brexit wouldn't have happened if they had compulsory voting so there's no denying it's valuable.
"you get a sausage at the sausage sizzle" is going to be my phrase of the week, thank you!
It doesn’t take long
Urgh. Tell that to ECQ at last month's council elections. Absolute fucking farcical job they did running those elections.
To be clear, I am asking why the "push" is for compulsory and not optional, given there is likely to be stronger opposition to the former. Either will give a voice to those who want one, but on paper optional would seem to be a more realistic goal and therefore makes more sense to advocate for. Advocating for compulsory kind of feels like letting perfect be the enemy of good, so to speak.
Why not start them off in the way you mean to continue? It's not like there are any significant downsides.
The push is to lower the voting age to 16. Plus, I doubt making it optional until 18 would change many people's minds on whether or not we should lower the voting age.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
At 16, you can learn to drive, open a bank account, get a job, pay taxes, be on the Organ Donor Register, and apply to join the army.
"We saw a massive amount of young people heading to the streets protesting, talking to their local MPs, posting on social media [about issues at the time]," she says.
Analysis of the 2022 federal election undertaken by the Australian National University shows that young people are drifting away from the major parties.
But apart from the Greens and a few independents, political parties today are coy about whether they support the concept of lowering the voting age.
The federal Labor government doesn't have a position on allowing 16-year-olds to vote, but Minister for Youth Anne Aly told the ABC it was important for young people to be engaged in politics as it had an effect on their lives.
Fifty-one years ago, Australia's voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 by Gough Whitlam, the Labor prime minister at the time, with bipartisan support.
The original article contains 817 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
youngsters feel disenfranchised, because they haven't reached the age to be considered franchised in the first place
There first needs to be someone who is votable. Its always a selection of shitty choices. Its not a choice if no one produces improvements for the populus