by Barbara McKenzie
The New Zealand Supreme Court has ruled in favour of lowering the voting age to 16.
‘Justice France told the court it was inconsistent with the Bill of Rights to not allow 16-year-olds to vote, and the decision of the Court of Appeal was overturned.’
Jacinda Ardern announced the same day, 21 November, that the Cabinet had decided ‘to draft a piece of legislation with a proposal to lower the age to 16 for the whole of Parliament to consider’. While the required 75% majority makes its success unlikely, Labour’s present majority means this may be its best chance for a long time, and if the Bill does gets through, it will be very difficult to reverse. However it comes at an interesting time:
Education standards are plummeting
Nearly two-thirds of students failed the writing standard in the latest NCEA literacy and numeracy pilot, released in October. The highest pass rate was the reading standard, with 64% of students scoring an achieved or higher. That was followed by numeracy at 56% and writing at 34%. Those pass rates were even lower than the results in 2021, which themselves were a matter of concern for educators.
At the same time, truancy is skyrocketing. Earlier this month Education Review Office warned that NZ has worse school attendance than other English-speaking countries and many parents don’t care if their children miss classes. Children failing in the 3Rs, and their reluctance to attend school, can in part be put down to the destructive pandemic measures, ranging from disruption to schooling to enforced mask wearing. Another factor could be:
NZ education consists of wall to wall indoctrination, manipulation and abuse
The New Zealand school curriculum exposes children to every kind of damaging wokery, including:
- Critical race theory, whereby children have imposed upon them colonial guilt if of European descent, and victimhood and inferiority if Maori. The capacity for bullying in the classroom of racial minorities of Maori or European descent is huge.
- Conscious grooming for gender transition (leading to counselling, puberty blockers, mutilation, sterility, and more counselling);
- Endless lies about ‘climate change’, with children consciously indoctrinated to become activists for the pseudoscience ‘climate change’ narrative, and no room for critical thinking.
Wry comments by Peter Dunne on this subject are here
Somebody pointed out to me that modern 16 year olds don’t even know what gender they are (was tempting to add it to the title … )
We added it to our headline … 🙂
If you can, I can 😉
Yes, let the kiddies vote. Whay could go wrong? They know zilch about anything but Saint Greta of Sweden has given them a taste for political power somit’s all good…