This oughta go down well. It might be a public holiday in large parts of the country, but *the discourse* doesn’t take any days off. Bastion of politically bullshittery Sunrise this morning featured their regular Spy vs Spy cartoon-style segment with Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young and her exact polar opposite in every conceivable metric, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.
On the programme this morning, the senators engaged in a bizarre spat that started out from something they agreed with: raising the tobacco purchasing age to 21.
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In the middle of this rant, Hanson took a bizarre left (or right, as it were) turn and suggested that, in fact, the legal voting age should also be raised to 21 mostly because young people both have “never held a job,” and “have no idea.”
Ok. Sure.
Pauline Hanson thinks it’s not just the smoking age that should be raised to 21 in Australia, but the voting age as-well. #sun7 pic.twitter.com/Ro0wMJJyOl
— Sunrise (@sunriseon7) October 1, 2017
Hanson’s remarks there are in direct response to the Greens’ proposed policy of lowering the voting age to 16, which would put an extra 580,500 young people onto electoral roll. People that, it should probably be noted, are squarely in the Greens’ core youth voting demographic.
Regardless, Pauline thinks that’s a shitful idea because young people have obviously never had a job, have never paid taxes, and therefore clearly have no understanding of politics and should not be able to have a say.
Great logic there, Pauline. In fact, why stop at 21? Lets make voting exclusive to people aged 50 and over. And while we’re at it, let’s make it income, race, and relationship-based too, because it’s about damned time that older straight white upper-middle class people were actually allowed to have a say, instead of being silenced by getting regular air time on national TV.
