By Elizabeth Davies
I’m not a hugely political person, my weekends aren’t filled with political protests, I don’t get giddy when I bump into a local MP in the supermarket and you won’t find me door-knocking, trying to convert anyone who will listen. That’s not to say I have no interest in politics. I watch, I listen and when the time comes I pop down to my local school and cast my vote.
I firmly believe that if you are legally entitled to vote it is your duty to do so. In the 2011 election 42% of 18-24 year olds didn’t vote, compared to 5.2% of those over 65. The figures are not only staggering they are incredibly depressing.
When the budget was released I acknowledged how left out I felt, how it seemed like the government simply didn’t care about my generation. Faced with those figures I’m forced to ask myself a significant question – why should the government care about us when so many of us don’t care enough to cast a vote either way?
The baby bribe budget was a plea for votes. No one is trying to buy our votes because half of us don’t bother turning up to vote in the first place.
The concept of ‘financial security’ is swiftly becoming a joke. My generation's future as employees, business owners, parents, home-owners and ratepayers is being sacrificed in order to buy the votes of older generations. Voting is one of the only ways we have to change our financial future.
For many young people politics is overwhelming, difficult to understand, boring and tricky to relate to. They avoid the voting process because they don’t feel informed enough to make a decision. Others feel daunted by their own seeming insignificance, a single vote is a shout in the void so how could they, as an individual, even begin to hope to make a difference?
I’ve encountered many people who refuse to vote because they have no faith in New Zealand’s political system and politicians. They don’t want to participate in something they so actively dislike, a feeling we can all sympathise with at times given the behaviour of our politicians.
But if you don’t vote you have no right to complain. If you don’t like the way things are then at least attempt to change them, or keep quiet.
Voting doesn’t have to be scary, it can be simple. Decide what matters to you and why, do a little research to find out the parties and people that share your priorities and choose accordingly. An organisation called RockEnrol has been formed by 25 year-old Laura O’Connell-Rapira and 21 year-old Sam Dyson to encourage young people to hit the polls, regardless of who they cast their vote for.
RockEnrol is organising a series of house parties and concerts with Kiwi musicians in the lead up to the September election. The gigs will be free, on the condition that you are enrolled to vote. The movement was created by young people for young people, in the hopes of convincing them of their own political significance and power. They aren’t interested in how you cast your vote, they simply want you to cast it.
Our government can only be changed from the inside and we can’t affect something that we refuse to participate in. The only wasted vote is the one that goes uncast.
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Elizabeth Davies is a 24 year-old graduate of the Auckland University of Technology post graduate journalism course. She lives with her partner in Epsom and spends her free time refurbishing vintage furniture and attempting to bake while fighting a daily battle against her bank balance. She writes a weekly article for interest.co.nz on money matters and financial struggles from a young person's perspective.
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