Pauline Hanson's One Nation WA has questioned why taxpayers money is being used to ask children if they want to be given the vote.

Media reports have revealed that Children and Young People Commissioner Jacqueline McGowan-Jones has initiated a survey to find out from children if 16 year olds should get the vote.

The Commissioner was quoted as saying: “From 12 years and up they’re really much more politically astute in the majority of cases, not all cases and, you know, some are not as age or developmentally enabled as others, but there is really strong evidence that these young people have the knowledge and information they need to vote.”

Anyone with children, and any adult that has matured, will know why 16 year olds should not get the vote. That is not to say that there are not 16 year olds who do have the capacity, however much like many other things in life, they currently need to wait until they are 18.

Although there is merit to the argument that young people will be the ones who will reap the consequences of today's policy decisions, that does not mean that they are qualified or experienced to know what the future will likely bring.

The world is a very complex place, and nobody can know everything, but the more you learn, the more you know, and learning takes time. Many would point out that this is why young people tend to be left leaning, whereas when people get older, they get more conservative.

The reason we don't let children do some things is because it has been determined that people under the age of 18 are not capable of understanding the consequences of their actions. This is why they are held to a different standard than adults.

There is no real reason or need to lower the voting age, and some cynical people will suggest it is just a ploy from the left to get a bigger voter base. 

At best this seems to be a waste of time and money, and at worst this might be another attempt at social engineering by the progressive left. Or maybe the adult advocates of lowering the voting age still have a mental age of 12 themselves, and thus consider the political opinions of 12 year olds to be valid based on their own childlike understanding of the world.

But the progressives should be careful, as the recent European elections have demonstrated, many young people will be voting for conservative parties, as they are the ones having their future and security stolen by mass migration and a lowering of living standards resulting from climate policy.