Public Elections - reduction in voting age to 16 - States Assembly

To the public, Politicians all seem the same.
They break their promises.
And in any case, important decisions are often made somewhere else…
…by someone else.
Fundamentally, at both a national and local level, people feel that they have little or no
control over the decisions that affect their lives.
That is an indictment of a country that likes to consider itself a beacon of democracy.
No wonder electoral turnout is down and support for fringe parties is up.
There are several bogus arguments put forward to explain why people are disengaged
from politics.
One is that what we’re facing is, in fact, a tide of apathy.
That somehow people are either too busy at work or too consumed by celebrity trivia to
engage with civil society.
Helena Kennedy has skewered this lie masterfully. She says:
"People in Britain still volunteer; they run in marathons for charity; they hold car boot
sales to raise funds for good causes; they take part in Red Nose days and wear ribbons
for breast cancer or AIDS. They sit as school governors, do prison visiting, read with
children who have learning difficulties. They take part in school races and run the school
disco. They march against the Iraq war and in favour of the countryside. They sign
petitions for extra street lights and more frequent bin collection. They send their savings
to the victims of tsunamis and want to end world poverty."
Does that sound like apathy No.
Another idea I don’t buy is that politicians are too similar to each other.
That public doesn’t have a real choice.
I don’t accept that a large gulf between parties is a reliable indicator of political health.
I’m glad that the era of cold war confrontation and stark ideological differences is behind
us.
Consensus can be a good thing.
It doesn’t have to be a problem as long as - and these are important caveats - genuine
differences are not concealed and people have other mechanisms for making choices.
Along with bogus analyses come bogus solutions
One of the worst of these, recently outlined in an IPPR pamphlet, is the idea of
compulsory voting.
This presupposes that it’s fecklessness or lack of public spirit that keeps people away