My preferred method is to weight votes according to age: voters below, say, 30 would receive a more heavily weighted vote, voters 30 to 60 would get a less weighted vote, and those over 60 would retain their current single vote. For argument’s sake, you could multiply the vote of under-30s by 1.3 and that of 30- to 60-year-olds by 1.1. People’s ballot papers could be distinguished by colour – under-30s get blue, 30s to 60s green and oldies red – to make counting easier on election night.
It is interesting that there is no maximum voting age. It is difficult to construct an argument for a minimum that doesn’t become one for a maximum.
I think we should just implement actual democracy, instead of this bourgeois half-measure. But if we are sticking with elitism a general knowledge test of recent events/political system knowledge/literacy would be a very funny way to weight votes.
Children are represented by their parents who advocate for them.
Old people need to advocate for themselves.
A poll test is anti-democratic as hell, and a step towards authoritarianism.
…
considering the emphasised text extracted from the above passage what do you think the author’s stance on the article is?
Why do you think she used those terms? Are they at odds with her opinion or reenforcing it?
Consider the way the author has described the current system as a “bourgeois half-measure” contrasted with “actual democracy” what do you think the author imagines instead? Where else has similar language been used in relation to critiques of European representative democracy?
Thanks for the flashback to high school
A maximum politician age would be a preferable first step if considering age caps.
I would vehemently endorse such a bill. Under the guise of ‘All Australians retire at x’. I’d propose that number to be ~70 years old.
Interestingly, our politics aren’t too bad at this. Only 4/226 members in parliament and senate are over this age (they’re all blokes of course). Contrast to the USA where this is a far bigger issue - over a third of their senators are over 70 and a fifth of their house members (not sure what the term for those is) are over 70.
Australia has preferential compulsory voting. If people here wanted to vote for a geriatric local representative then so be it. Better for the people to make that decision and to be able to take it back than to live under the boot of an autocracy.
Since we elect local and state representatives and not a tyrant any old person has to exhibit some level of political ability to navigate party politics to the front bench.
We cop a lot of distorted shit from US politics here. To the point we have lost MAGAs wandering around. The average age of their reps is 57 and their senate is 65. Their tyrant is an 80 year old with obvious dementia. Our PM is 63 and the average is 52 here. I want to see more 30 year olds in parliament and I think the average age needs to be closer to 40. I think we do this by getting young people away from their phones and into community orgs and public service not by age restrictions. How are we going to level up our young people to take on public service? It is a struggle to fill the positions on local sporting clubs and community groups. Scrolling on your phone is not participation.
How can you have a real democracy when the majority of voters only ever vote for 2 parties?
Fix the system as much as you want, but how do you fix the voters?
Well if you remove the parties and get people voting directly on issues instead, you’re one step closer to a real democracy.
Representative democracy is just a way for the lobbyists and rich to have all the power by buying a few people and spamming them with financial/media support to win and advance their agenda.
Direct democracy is a pretty flawed and exhausting way to do things. It’s very rare that a person has strong knowledge and interest in more than one or two domains and so consultation is necessary. Every individual replicating that work is an idealistic fantasy.
You can look at how rapidly interest in repeat votes falls off in cases like the French revolution. Copying a model of recallable ground up councils seems more sensible to me.
Local people get together and send some number of speaking/voting representatives to the next tier of organising body and so on. Meetings are always open, but only these representatives have the right to speak so you can actually get stuff done. People who aren’t happy with how the people they chose are doing can always recall them and choose again. You aim to have consensus as a process for approval with quorum establishment to break critical lock ups. Power can be devolved to higher councils but recalled by the lower ones, so ultimately the seat of power is the local level where people are much more engaged and social mechanisms help temper abuse of power.
It’s undoubtably slower and less efficient, but stuff like the anarchist councils in the Spanish civil war shows it can work I think. It would require trial and revision.
edit: importantly though we can’t say we live democratically if the majority of social arrangements necessary for live are dictatorial. Housing, work, and community life must be transformed. Voting on some law or trade treaty and then going to your completely disenfranchised job to pay rent for your disenfranchised housing is not democracy in any material sense.
I wouldn’t trust Australians to vote directly on issues, these are the same people who made the ford ranger and toyota hilux the highest selling vehicles for years, even though the majority of Australians live in cities.
There is no doubt that the system is broken, and the majority of politicians, and parties are corrupt, but the people make really bad choices.
ladies, gents, gremlins: political enlightenment
“Australians can’t be trusted to vote, instead they should vote for someone who certainly cannot be trusted”
Politicians are the same people who support Israel, are in bed with LLM data centres, do jack shit on climate issues, focus on corporations over people, etc.
More often than not politicians act against the wishes of Australians.
That is true because the majority of politicians are right wing (including the alp), yet the people still keep voting for them.
it is the same as blaming billionaires and corporations for everything wrong in the world, many of them are definitely bad, but it is the people who fund them by using their products and services. Blaming them changes nothing, they don’t really care about the blame, as long as they still get your money.
If you want a better world, be a better person, boycott dodgy companies, don’t vote for dodgy politicians. There has been a decent choice on every single ballot that I have ever seen, they are surrounded by bad choices, but they are there.
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not applicable to aus anywhere afaik
Did that over a century ago.
Then half of the Aussie population (or more) wouldn’t be able to vote! You are being super-elitist! 😆
Agree.
Why would you need a maximum voting age? If someone has the maturity and clarity to vote, they should vote.
I did say it’d be funny, not good.
RE max: just as human brains start life half formed and silly, they end life that way too. It is well established that we suffer cognitive decline after a lifetime of various insults to the brain and general aging. Nobody is ever as sharp as they were in the mid twenties. We try and make up for this with wisdom but we all go to the grave early or a shell of ourselves.
The cognitive arguments around a minimum extend to a maximum. Realistically you can’t, but you can’t have a well defined minimum either. I think it would be cool to let anyone interested vote, provided they can pass some general knowledge stuff first if they’re say under 16 or 14 or something to demonstrate they’re cognizent of what they’re doing.
We’re on the same page but not the same paragraph.
If we’re gonna be ageist and generalise I’ll add my 20c worth. In your mid-twenties you are neither more or less sharp than in your mid-sixties or even seventies. Much has to do with genetic, developmental, cultural and particularly lifestyle factors. A twenty-something person who has lived in physical, social, or cultural deprivation is unlikely to be as sharp as a sixty-something person who has lived in relative affluence which would be marked by healthy nutrition, reasonable educational opportunities, contacts, stability, etc.
General knowledge is also culturally loaded.
Anyway, I won’t rave on. The gist is that generalising about personal attributes like age, gender, etc, is a bit silly and not useful. They cannot be used as sole indicators of anything. We grow and develop out of a complex of factors and we need to implement real democracy, as you say, and also work towards a much fairer and just society than we have now.
Age related cognitive decline is extremely well documented. There is no way around it, you can slow it sometimes but everyone shows decline, it’s well established. Particularly between 60-80 decline starts becoming rapid.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41999-025-01377-8 for example is a longitudinal study of several hundred adults. They find:
If you think people can be too young to think clearly because their brain is far enough from a healthy adult human’s as to represent one unsuitable for decision making you necessarily must draw the same conclusions around aged brains. It’s not bias, it’s just decay. We all rot in the end
What I am saying is that all of us, no matter our age, are affected by multiple, complex factors and that we shouldn’t be too quick to generalise. Our body does wear down but this doesn’t have to affect decision-making. Some go to their deaths in their 90s with a very lucid mind, some start getting dementia symptoms in their 40s and some a lot earlier, including childhood. We are all affected by a society which tends to promote health-reducing habits and environments for reasons of profit and then there are genetic factors in the mix as well. There’s quite a bit of research at present on healthy old age.
From the moment we are born, we are one day closer to our death but that doesn’t mean we must accept how we fare according to general trends. Our intelligence changes, not only declines, and we can play a conscious role in this.