Derryn Hinch (Victoria, Derryn Hinch's Justice Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm sure I can't even attempt to match Senator Dastyari's school and university pranks and liveliness, because I didn't know what a high school dropout was until I went to America and discovered that I was one!

I'm in two minds even about standing up and saying anything today in this debate, because I don't want to give any credence to such a loopy One Nation policy as this one. But I will have a go at one area, and that is that Senator Hanson has said that people shouldn't be voting at 18, 19 or 20 because they don't pay taxes. Well, there are some of us here who have been paying taxes since we were 15, when we left school and started work. I suspect that there were teenagers working at Senator Hanson's fish-and-chip shop who probably paid taxes, unless she was paying them under the table. There are a lot of kids who pay taxes at the ages of 15, 16 and 17. Certainly, they should be allowed to vote at 18. I don't agree with the Greens and Senator Dastyari about lowering the age to 16; I think that it should stay at 18. I certainly don't believe in lifting it to 21, but at 18, as other senators have said, you can vote, you can drive and you can get married. If you commit crimes then you will be tried in an adult court. You can gamble and you can go to the pub—all those sorts of things. And also at 18 you can enlist in the military and die for your country. You should be allowed to have the right to vote at any time that an election is called.

All I would say to Senator Hanson is that, when she says that 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds shouldn't have the right to vote in this country, she should go to Gallipoli. Go there, as some of us have done on Anzac Day, and walk through the graveyards in Gallipoli. See those tombstones at the bottom of the cliff there and see the ages of some of those young men who died for us and for the right to vote. They were 19 and 20, and some of them probably even lied about their age and they may have been 17 or 18. So we should leave the voting age at 18 years. I think this is a loopy idea.