THE Greens, whose policies I don’t usually spend much time perusing, got me thinking this week. Their latest push is to have the voting age lowered to 16 years of age, something few countries with the Westminister model of governance have – although Scotland, Wales and Jersey in the UK do. Democracy means a lot of things; originally from the Greek words demos, meaning whole or free citizen, and kratos, meaning power or to rule. The differences back in ancient Greece alternated between democracy, which meant ruled by the people, as opposed to oligarchy, which meant ruled by the few. So a city was a democracy if city affairs were subject to an assembly to which all male citizens belonged and in which decisions were made by simple majority vote. We’ve come quite a long way since the time when people came to witness the vocal orators so beloved of the masses who had to vote on every law passed. Nor do we still have a system where the public servants got their jobs by lottery so that every (free and male) citizen had a chance at such roles if they wanted them. It’s a complex, convoluted juggernaut, increasing all the time as more people brought into our country mean more laws must be enacted to ensure every eventuality is covered. One would think that our primary and secondary schools would have the way we govern as part of our curriculum; a must-learn. But they don’t other than a bit of a waterski over it by some. Yet, it is the cornerstone of who we are. The very basis by which we say we are Kiwis because these laws generally apply to us alone, other than those which are signed off as part of international agreements and pacts. If the average 30-year-old doesn’t get that most of our legislation is put together by public servants, law lords and not by the MPs who actually must pass the legislation, or understand that the departments by which each Minister is a nominal head run largely autonomously until such time as the MP is required to sign something off, how then will a 16-year-old understand it? Who is going to explain to a very young voter what negative voting means? How a result can be skewed by voting differently in the party votes than MP vote for example? The right to vote is important. But no less so than knowing how to vote.It seems to me that if this idea was going to come to some kind of fruition, then it would be better off if two things happened. That the young ones had the right to vote in local body elections first, so that the much more simple workings of local bureaucracy can be better explained, and secondly put it into the national curriculum to give sufficient knowledge for our young ones to at least have a modicum of an idea before letting them loose on central governance voting.
