Make It 16 calls for a lower voting age

Make It 16 is an advocacy group for lowering the voting age in New Zealand. The campaign started in 2019 as a product of Youth Parliament, and has worked its way up to a national network of people advocating for 16- and 17-year-olds to be granted the right to vote. Make It 16 has recently made their case in front of the Supreme Court – the most superior court in New Zealand.

“Lowering the voting age to 16 is just another vehicle to have better representation for the issues of our time, which includes the threat of climate change, dwindling mental health systems, rapid inequality and a housing crisis that seems unsolvable for generations,” says Sanat Singh, Co-Director of Make It 16.

“We need people in power that are going to be thinking about the long term, and are going to think about how to solve these existential issues. We also need voters that are going to hold the people in power more accountable to those issues.”

A common argument against lowering the voting age is that 16-year-olds are not mature enough to vote. Sanat Singh says, “Take a 16-year-old versus an 18-year-old. There isn’t a big difference in maturity levels, and there is a lot of data around the development of our brains and our decision-making abilities that backs this up. I also don’t think maturity is a great indicator of whether someone should be able to vote, because we have people eligible to vote that are far more immature than sixteen-year-olds.”

Make It 16 also believes that preventing 16- and 17-year-olds from voting is unjustified age discrimination under the NZ Bill of Rights Act. Currently, the Bill of Rights has the voting age of 18 set in stone, the same Bill of Rights that states the Government cannot discriminate based on the grounds listed in s 21 of the Human Rights act 1993, which includes age discrimination for those aged 16 and above. The Bill of Rights also states that rights can be “reasonably limited” without breaching the Bill of Rights if those limits are justified. Make It 16 believes that there is no such justification for disallowing 16-year-olds to vote, and therefore their fundamental rights have been breached.

“The Supreme Court is not due to pass a decision any time soon, it will be at least a couple of months, and we are going to let them take their time. However, the arguments that we are representing are pretty fundamental to what we want New Zealand democracy to look like right now, and we hope that the Supreme Justices listened to what we had to say and agree with us,” says Sanat Singh.

“What we really want to do is create a space and a conversation around what young people can really bring to the table in our country, because currently the state of the conversation is dire. We tend to underestimate young people a lot, and overlook them and dismiss them, and that should not be the case. The Make It 16 movement, if anything, is trying to create a world, or at least a country to begin with, where people are not written off like that anymore.”

So why now? Our voting age has been set at 18 since 1974, why is now the right time for it to change? Make It 16 writes, “The decisions that affect us and the issues that determine the course of our life are not being decided by us or our generation. We are systemically being excluded from a democracy that seeks to create a world that we have to fix. Therefore, we need the vote, we deserve the vote and we will get the vote.”

“The window for lowering the voting age has never been better,” says Sanat Singh. “The period of 2022 and 2023 [has] presented a lot of opportunities, and there are still a lot of opportunities to really push for. We have local elections coming up, two electoral review panels and then the general elections next year, so not only are conversations about politics and what’s happening in our lives taking the front and center, but conversations about the way we run our democracy are also happening.”

“If we want to lower the voting age in the next 5-10 years, this is our window to do the most pushing.”

The Make It 16 petition is currently 6,300 signatures deep into a goal of 10,000, which Sanat says is an “achievable goal”. As well as signing the petition, Sanat also encourages everybody in favour of lowering the voting age to give the ‘Make It 16’ social media pages a follow, and to help them out by sharing posts and advocating for the cause.

“Whatever spaces you’re located in, or whatever platforms you have, create conversations with people and say ‘look, what do you think about lowering the voting age?’.”

To sign the petition, head to www.makeit16.org.nz