Our politicians would have us believe that giving the freedom to persons of 16 years to vote is an extension of democracy in Malta. In truth, this is nothing but a dishonest charade.

One party is seeking to grab the votes of our teenagers under the guise of offering them participation in our democratic process, while the other party is playing along fearing that opposing this move will alienate this segment from supporting it.  I have yet to come across one parent who is convinced that lowering the voting age in national elections to 16 works in the children’s interest.

Our politicians are not giving our teenagers anything through this Bill and they care nothing about their welfare.

In Ecclesiastes 3 – the psalm, A Time for Everything, mentions that there is a “time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted” and that God has made everything beautiful in its time.

I can see nothing beautiful in dragging 16-year-olds into the steaming cesspool that Maltese politics is becoming. If 16-year-olds are mature enough to vote, then should they be also allowed to gamble and indulge in other activities normally reserved for adults?

We seem to have an obsession with uprooting what has been planted before its time. Just have a look at our 14-year-old girls dressed like 30-year-old prostitutes on Saturday nights. Our society is confusing innocence with naivete.

What the Bill demonstrates is that other countries are not fools like us

Most 16-year-olds are not naïve, but they have a right to their innocence as it is an intricate part of their youth. It is tragic when you look at a child who has the expression of an adult, which happens when people have their childhood innocence stolen from them through bitter experience such as abuse, broken families and extreme poverty.

It is the adults’ responsibility to safeguard the innocence of the young and, through the socialisation process, education and proper upbringing ensure that they are far from being naïve as part of their preparation to adulthood.

There are those who are proposing to educate children in secondary schools in political matters. I think the issue is more fundamental than that. What is sorely required is to train our children in critical thinking as an essential life skill, to grow up into individuals who can question and form their own informed opinions.

I suspect that the real reason behind reducing the voting age is that the earlier one wears partisan blinkers in life, the more difficult it will be to remove them during adulthood.

If our politicians really have the interest of our youth at heart, there would have been proper consultation with all stakeholders, including parents’ organisations, educators and civil society.

This issue should have been raised at the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development for the input of the social partners.

It is evident that the consensus in Parliament about something this sensitive is not reflected by the population which our politicians are meant to represent. This is because while many families have their children’s welfare as their priority, our politicians’ main consideration is power.

It is an insult to our intelligence that this Bill is being presented as being progressive on the basis that only Austria has thus far granted voting rights to 16-year-olds. What it demonstrates is that other countries are not fools like us. They are probably looking down on us with the curiosity of scientists gazing at a petri dish to determine how this wild experiment is going to work out.

I stress that opposing voting rights to 16-year-olds is completely unrelated to whether one has faith in coming generations, as I have full confidence that many of our children will grow into responsible adults. However, this does not imply that we should burden our youths with adulthood before their time.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.