Joe Hutch
Mate of the bloke
I think lowering the voting age to 14 is a bad idea because the majority of children so young don't have sufficiently well-developed reasoning skills.
When I was training to be a teacher I remember being warned by my tutors against trying to empathise with the experience of your students based on your memory of being their age because the ability of 90% of your students will be below that of yours when you were their age.
I think this applies to most of us on this board, certainly to Tony. He was certainly politically aware as indeed I was at that age but most 14 to 17 year-old kids just aren't.
It's different with me. I'm against lowering the voting age to 14 precisely because I remember how clueless about politics and just about everything else I was at that age.