The government has introduced a bill in Parliament to lower the voting age for local elections to 16, a move being welcomed by some and opposed by others.
“He tino rawe tēnei aheinga mō ngā rangatahi tekau mā ono te pakeke ki te pōti,” says Te Pāti Māori’s 20-year old candidate for Hauraki-Waikato, Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke. (It would be great for 16-year-olds to be able to vote.)
However, suffrage should come with education on key civics and political matters, she says.
Thomas Brocherie, co-founder of Make it 16, the youth campaign advocating for 16- and 17-year-olds to be able to vote, says lowering the voting age for local elections is a “brilliant, brilliant first step.”
Young Greens’ equity officer and year thirteen student Johnny Bentley-Cribb says the youth wing believes “16 and 17-year-olds should also be allowed to vote in central elections.”
“The age of non-discrimination in NZ is 16, so there is no qualification for the fact that the current age for voting is 18,” he says.
But National Party MP Paul Goldsmith says the current age of 18 “works fine.”
“I am amazed they (the government) are prioritising this before the election,” he says, adding that National will not be supporting the bill.
Voting rights through the ages
When New Zealand’s first Parliament was elected in 1854, only men over the age of 21 who owned or leased property over a certain value could vote in the elections. This criteria largely excluded Māori, who had communal land ownership. The establishment of four Māori seats in 1867 extended voting rights to Māori men over 21 years of age, although universal suffrage for all males over 21 came only in 1879.
In 1893 New Zealand became the first country to grant universal suffrage to women. The minimum age for voting was still 21 and would remain so until 1969, when it was lowered to 20. The current age of 18 was introduced in 1974.
In November 2022, Make It 16 moved the Supreme Court to declare that setting the voting age at 18 was inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act, on the basis of age-based discrimination. This was followed by an announcement from the then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern that “the cabinet had resolved to draft a piece of legislation with a proposal to lower the voting age to 16 for the whole of parliament to consider.”
A matter of majority
Changing the voting age for the general elections, however, requires a super majority (75% MPs in favour), something that would only be possible with support from at least some National Party MPs. But with National’s caucus reaching a party decision that 18 was the appropriate voting age, this became very unlikely.
However, lowering the age for local elections requires only a simple majority, which Labour already has. The Greens support changing the voting age to 16 and leader David Seymour has said ACT supports lowering the voting age at the local level.
This has prompted the government to introduce the Electoral (Lowering Voting Age for Local Elections and Polls) Legislation Bill on Tuesday. However, with only two more sitting weeks for parliament, and a considerable number of bills being debated under urgency, it is unlikely the bill will progress to select committee stage before the elections.