Lowering Australia's voting age to 16 without fortifying civic foundations would be misguided

The Guardian

22-07-2025

Every few years, Australia resurrects the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 – usually prompted by a campaign or because some other country (with a fairly different electoral context) is doing so. And every time, we fail to address the question of whether we are prepared as a nation; in my opinion, the answer is no.
It's not that I'm philosophically opposed to enfranchising 16‑ and 17‑year‑olds. After all, democracy thrives on fresh voices. The hitch comes when you hand a driving licence to someone who has never sat behind a wheel. Without robust civic and media‑literacy education, and without any clear evidence that 16- and 17-year‑olds themselves demand this change, we'd be giving young Australians an Ikea flat‑pack democracy with no instruction manual.
I won't dignify the cognitive capability argument against lowering voting age – sharp minds exist among teens as well of course. But readiness is another matter. Internal efficacy – belief in one's ability to effect change – runs low: in the Australian National University Generation study of 3,131 16- and 17-year-old Australians, just 3.5% backed a lowered compulsory vote, 18% wanted a voluntary ballot and more than 70% favoured keeping the voting age at 18. This mirrored past statistics among older voting youth and the overall voting public – highlighting public reluctance for lowering voting age. This lack of confidence isn't surprising when earlier this year, school students have recorded their lowest civic‑knowledge scores in two decades, and 47% of gen Z voters said their main motivation for casting a ballot in 2022 was avoiding a $20 fine, not civic conviction.
Thinking about where they get their information from, social media reigns supreme when it comes to news consumption. Forty per cent of 18-to-24-year‑olds get news on Instagram and 36% on TikTok, yet only 24% of all Australians have had news‑literacy training, according to the 2025 Digital News Report. Given this fragmented media landscape where political misinformation is rife and AI chatbots are increasingly asked to provide tailored news, any notion of voluntary voting – or haphazard enfranchisement – is nonsense unless we first mandate robust civics and media‑literacy education.
Independent MP Monique Ryan's proposal of the fallback option of voluntary voting for 16‑ and 17‑year‑olds risks tampering with what ties our young people to the democratic system. If we waive fines for teen no‑shows, we'll replace steady turnout with shrugging indifference (precisely the problem our UK counterparts are trying to solve).
In Australia, state-initiated registration and mandatory voting keep our youngest cohorts turning up in significantly higher numbers than in most democracies. In my PhD research across 35 OECD nations, these were the most important electoral design features that drive youth participation, not voting age. Removing them now would be a step backwards, not forwards.
Now let's talk party politics. Young voters today are no monolithic bloc but a fractured constellation of issue‑driven minds. Election analyses show 18-to-29-year‑olds are more likely to switch allegiances mid‑campaign and to abandon major parties altogether. Ryan's bid to lower the voting age makes political sense: gen Z are already drifting towards independents and minor parties such as the Greens more than their predecessors, the millennials.
So in practice, any voting‑age reform will likely remain a partisan tug‑of‑war rather than a matter of democratic principle. The Greens have been pushing to extend the franchise to 16‑ and 17‑year‑olds, arguing it would amplify youth voices in policymaking (even though enfranchised younger voters today remain poorly represented in policy outcomes than their parents). Labor fears that a younger, more progressive electorate would hand the Greens an entrenched advantage – and that voluntary voting for teens could undermine Australia's compulsory model. The Coalition seems wary that any electoral tweak is likely to advantage the left.
Viewed this way, lowering the voting age looks less like principled reform and more like partisan manoeuvring – although injecting a small new cohort is unlikely to upend the broad electoral currents already in motion.
Lowering the voting age certainly won't magically bridge the trust gap between young Australians and their representatives. Unless we first diagnose why so many youths distrust politicians, simply adding unprepared 16‑ and 17‑year‑olds to the roll risks token turnout or – under a voluntary scheme – a surge in protest abstention. The solution isn't a standalone ballot‑box fix but a two‑pronged approach (while maintaining compulsory voting): first we must invest in compulsory civics, media and digital‑literacy education across our secondary schools, and only then can we negotiate lowering voting age.
Perhaps the moment is ripe to roll out these reforms in tandem. I'll leave it to Ryan, the Greens and the ALP to whatever mix of electoral legacy‑building or genuine youth advocacy they pursue – but I remain unconvinced that enfranchising new voters without fortifying their civic foundations is anything but misguided, if not downright harmful.
Dr Intifar Chowdhury is a youth researcher and a lecturer in government at Flinders University