BILL Shorten can’t impress the adults. So now he wants to let children vote as well.
After all, they’re still reckless enough to vote Labor.
What better explanation for the Labor leader’s bizarre declaration that he wants to now let 16 and 17-year-olds vote, too?
How strange. Why trust schoolchildren with decisions on raising and spending hundreds of billions of dollars?
We now need the help of the least experienced, least trained, least knowledgeable and most reckless and excitable part of our citizenry to run this place?
But how predictable that Labor should say yes.
Ian McAllister, from the Australian National University’s School of Politics and International Relations, says lowering the voting age from 18 would cut the Coalition vote by 0.2 per cent.
As they say: if you don’t vote socialist when you’re 20, you don’t have a heart. If you don’t vote conservative when you’re 30, you don’t have a brain. And, yes, I did work for Labor when young. Naturally, Shorten can’t admit he’s desperate for gullible voters.
So here’s his excuse: “If Australia trusts our 16- and 17-year-old citizens to pay tax and work, to join the military, to drive on our roads, to fly a plane, to make independent decisions about their medical care, then we, the parliament of Australia, should extend that trust to include a direct, empowered say in our democracy.”
Actually, you can’t join the military at 16.
Moreover, there are just 17,000 taxpayers among the 470,000 children Labor now wants to give the vote.
Even those 17,000 hand over just $2410 each, on average. That’s well under half what the Government pays every single Australian just in welfare handouts, on average.
So we’d be giving the vote to children who don’t even come close to paying their own way, but can be relied upon by the Left to demand lots more of what other people earn.
Labor argues that the vote at least makes children think about civic responsibility and values, but where’s the evidence most care?
Even Shorten admits that 400,000 Australians who turned 18 between 2010 and 2013 didn’t even bother to enrol. Fine. Wait until they’ve got the wisdom to care. Let them vote then.
As for the younger ones, let them first learn how the world works before giving them the serious power to make their government change it.
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