Youth voting

Julie Neighbourly Lead from Havelock North

When I was 16 I thought I should be allowed to vote. I thought I was mature enough, and I understood the real world. I was an idiot. I knew nothing.

Yes, I knew a lot about politics, and racism, and sexism, and I figured I could see so much more clearly than the adults around me, because I wasn’t blinded by learned bias. Bollocks.

I knew what I had been conditioned to know. I hadn’t learned enough, from enough sources to know anything. I hadn’t seen, heard or experienced enough of the real world to learn a damn thing.

I grew up alternately neglected and abused, angry, alone, aware of things no child should be aware of. I grew up lost and seeking something I didn’t even understand existed, let alone how to find. I grew up knowing things, but was still as ignorant as a child could be, about the real world. Because the real world was more than my world.

At 16, I had one brother in and out of prison, one in the army, travelling with the UN peace keepers to Bosnia and Somalia. I had parent in the police force and a parent studying anthropology and sociology. I had grandparent who had been an airforce lieutenant colonel, in WWII, in the pacific islands, an uncle who was a firefighter, and two aunts in banking. And social workers. So many social workers. I had “sources”.

I knew nothing.

Even by 18, when it was legal to vote, I still knew nothing.

More than 30 years later, I still wonder if I know anything.

But what I do know, is those 16 year olds that want the right to vote now, are the same little darlings that scream around the streets, till dawn, in over powered machines mummy and daddy paid for, gathering in the domains, and playgrounds, and unfinished subdivisions to admire each others souped up egos, and commit ram raids on malls and bottle stores at the behest of the adults in their orbits, and say “but it wasn’t my fault” when it all goes wrong.

Yes, for the most part, they were smart enough to figure out that covid wasn’t a conspiracy and the vaccines aren’t about government control. But when they don’t have the common sense to understand you don’t stuff 6+ people into a 5 seat car and hit the gas, and expect it to all go well, do they really have the sense to be part of selecting who represents us, locally, nationally and globally?

Let them vote, but only for their youth representatives. Too many adults don’t have the sense to vote for good general governance, we can’t expect children to.