James Paterson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I find myself in an interesting position in this debate, in the middle of two equally silly propositions. On one side we have One Nation, which is very naively and ridiculously proposing to disenfranchise young people by removing their right to vote—to turn back the clock more than 40 years and take away the rights of about a million Australians to vote. That is obviously a ridiculous and silly proposition and, I'll say from the outset, not one that the government endorses or will entertain or will enact.

But equally, on the other side of the coin, we have, in my view, an equally silly notion from the Greens that we should lower the voting age to include 16- and 17-year-olds. I only came in halfway through Senator Hanson-Young's contribution, so I'm not sure if she referred to it in this speech—she certainly didn't in the second half of her speech—but it's an idea that the Greens have promoted in the past that we should lower the voting age to include 16- and 17-year-olds.

We're smack bang in the middle of this debate. On the government benches we believe that, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The existing voting age of 18 years makes eminent good sense. There is no need to increase it or lower it. There's no need to disenfranchise young people who already have the vote. To be honest, these ideas are so silly I think I'm going to seriously struggle to fill the 10 minutes that I've been allocated in this debate, but I will do my very best, and there are some important issues that can be discussed here.

As we all know, it's outlined in the Commonwealth Electoral Act that 18 years is the age at which you become entitled to vote. This issue was examined after the 2007 federal election when the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters discussed what the appropriate minimum age should be for provisional enrolment. They did recommend that the minimum age for voluntary provisional enrolment be lowered from 17 to 16 years but did not recommend lowering the voting age.

We believe that 18 is the right and appropriate age and should remain the legal age, because it is the age at which you are considered an adult in so many other areas of life. It is the age at which you are allowed to legally purchase alcohol. You're allowed to legally gamble. You're allowed to become a company director or to sign a contract. It's an age where, if you wish to enlist in military service, you are most commonly first allowed to do so. These are very important decisions in someone's life, and we recognise that at 18 years of age you've amassed sufficient life experience, skills and knowledge to exercise those. It was last changed in 1973 to lower the age to 18, and we don't think that there's any need to revisit that.

My experience when I talk to young people—being a younger person myself—is that the age at which they have a right to vote is not their No. 1 concern. There are certainly plenty of precocious 16- and 17-year-olds—as I was once, as I know Senator McGrath was once, as I know Senator Dastyari was once, not all that long ago—that are very excited and anticipating their right to vote for the first time when they turn 18 and can't wait to have their say. None of them have seriously suggested to me that we should lower the voting or age or have lobbied seriously to do that. What they do approach me about is the issues that impact them. They're more interested in the way government impacts on their lives and the policies that government has that impact their lives than in the process and the detail of how it does so.

When I talk to young people, what I hear from them most consistently is concern about their economic future and a desire to know that, when they graduate from high school or university or any other study that they do, there will be a good job for them to find that they will be able to apply for and receive. They tell me about their concern about their ability to enter the housing market and their ability to pay off a mortgage. They are worried about housing affordability. They raise that with me consistently. They also raise with me the amount of debt that current generations are leaving to future generations.

I make these observations not in any partisan sense. These have always been the concerns of young people. I suspect they always will be the concerns of young people. If we are, in all seriousness, interested in addressing the things most important to young people, we would be much better advised to focus on these practical, real things that impact their lives.

That's why I'm proud to be part of a government that has a very strong focus on providing jobs and a strong performance in providing jobs. In the last 12 months 300,000 jobs were created, which is a remarkable achievement and which will ensure that young people finishing study and looking to enter the workforce for the first time have something to look forward to, a bright economic future to be excited about and something to apply for and strive for.

On housing, we all acknowledge that housing affordability is not good in this day and age. Young people do struggle with it, and my friends and people in my age group are chief amongst those who struggle with it. That's something this government takes very seriously and is addressing. One of the measures in the most recent federal budget was the First Home Super Saver Scheme, which allows young people to utilise the tax-preferred superannuation system to save for a deposit for their first home. This will allow them to save for a deposit more quickly and more easily than they otherwise would have been able to.

On debt, I noticed in the financial statement issued by the finance minister last week that gross debt is now at $560 billion. That's more than anyone in this place should be comfortable with and more than anyone in this place should want. It is something that we should all be working much harder to address and to lower. It is not moral at all to leave young people growing up today with the burdens of debt that this generation has accrued by spending more on consumption today than we have been raising in revenue to meet the costs of. There is nothing moral about that at all. It's something that needs, in my view, far stronger action to address. It's certainly something this government has attempted to address. Had it not been for our attempts, the state of the budget and state of debt would have been far worse today than they are. We've been able to significantly bring down the trajectory of debt increases that were bequeathed by the former government. We've managed to rein that in substantially, and we should be very proud of that, but that doesn't mean that there isn't more work to do.

It is incumbent on this chamber in particular to consider its role in assisting the government to do that. In recent years, many attempts the government has made to reduce spending in order to reduce the deficit and ultimately to begin paying back the debt and reducing the debt within our lifetimes have been thwarted by this chamber or, more accurately, by parties who used their numbers in this chamber to stop the government's attempts. I think they should reflect on that when they come into this place and say that they're here to be advocates on behalf of young people and young people's interests. They should think very carefully about the votes they have made in this place in recent years which have gone very much against the interests of young people who will soon, when they do graduate and take on jobs, begin to pay back not just the expenses of running the government of the day in their lifetimes but the expenses of running the government of our day in our lifetimes because we weren't able to do so. That's a profoundly immoral thing.

To re-emphasise, the government has no plans to lower or increase the age of voting. We think it's a distraction. We think it's unnecessary. We think we should be focused on much more practical and pragmatic issues that are on the top of the minds of most young people—particularly those who don't follow politics every day, who don't watch question time every day and who don't follow us on Twitter but who just want to get on with their lives. They're much more interested—