THERE WAS an absence of young voters on TVNZ's 'Young Voters Debate' screened on Monday night. Instead, we were presented with half a dozen present MP's or MP wannabees, each trying to sell their party policies to 'the youth vote'. Only Te Pati Maori's Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, at 21 years of age, actually fell into the 18-24 voter category. National's Erica Stanford, at 48 years old, is hardly in the full flush of youth. And even the Green Party's Chloe Swarbrick is pushing thirty.
And, unlike most 18–24-year-olds, most of the panelists can be described as wealthy. Only NZ First's Lee Donoghue and Maipi-Clarke do not own a house or an apartment. Labour's Arena Williams owns multiple houses. Unlike typical 18–24-year-olds none of the six political candidates are struggling to find somewhere affordable to live.
According to the Electoral Commission only 64 percent of 18-24 years old have actually enrolled to vote, and it's unlikely they will all vote either. In stark contrast their elders have enrolled en masse. For example, nearly 98 percent of 60–64-year-olds have enrolled.
Yesterday, the low enrolment figure prompted conservative Newstalk ZB host, Tyler Adams, to admonish New Zealand's youth for failing to fulfil their so-called civic responsibilities. He, unfortunately, resorted to the lazy and nonsensical argument that 'if you don't enrol and vote, you have no right to complain'.
That hackneyed argument will not persuade young New Zealanders to vote. Nor will the Electoral Commission's hopeless advertising campaign that claims that young people can have a voice, if only they vote.
What isn't being discussed is that young people have disengaged from politics as it is presented today. And it's not because they are apathetic or irresponsible. It would be an immense mistake to think that because young people abstain from voting means they are not aware of today’s social problems, the inequalities their generation faces, nor their willingness to act.
Why is this disengagement happening? It's simply because they no longer have any faith in the political establishment to solve the problems New Zealand is confronted with. Nor can they conceive of their lives get any better under governments, whether they are Labour or National led, that continue to act on behalf of corporate interests. It would be a mistake to assume that youth are not aware who really benefits from our present economic arrangements.
Young people are knowledgeable about the problems they face. What is lacking is hope. Politics, rather than offering solutions to their everyday problems, seems remote, abstract, hostile. A growing number of young people, perhaps even the majority, have a profound lack of trust in the ability of existing institutions and leadership to meet their concerns.
It would have been appropriate to have some of these very same young people on a nationally televised debate expressing their concerns. Instead, we got a bunch of politicos, representatives of a failed status quo that young people have no faith in, hustling for votes. It's doubtful though that potential young voters were persuaded that the present set of political parties have anything to offer them but more of the same. Something has to change but that change is not going to come from the political parties that were represented in the 'Young Voters Debate'.
Many of these reasons also apply to most other age groups. Decades of the same empty promises, followed up by nothing.
ReplyDelete