Only who can vote now?

Why explanatory journalism should be safe, legal and rare

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

There is a certain genre of article that seeks to reduce complex topics into easily digestible narratives for public consumption. The idea is that a person of average literacy and comprehension will, as a result of consuming this content, understand the news a bit better. And in this vein, The Spinoff has an article seeking to explain a new member's bill aiming to abolish the ratepayer roll in local elections.

It is deserving of some pushback.

The signs are ominous early on. Canvassing the history of the property franchise, by which only people with an estate in land had the right to vote, the article quotes Labour MP Greg O’Connor stating that "In 1890, we fixed our electoral system, so you didn’t have to be a landowner to vote."

However, the property franchise was abolished in 1879. The first election held under universal male suffrage occurring in 1881. And if that seems pretty minor in the scheme of things, even in an article intended to explain the issues to people, it’s only a portent of the issues to come.

O’Connor is quoted as saying, "It’s an archaic practice… It’s time the same applies local body elections too." This statement seems to imply that property ownership is currently a requirement to vote in local elections, which is completely false. The current rule allows both residents and non-resident property owners to vote.

Perhaps we should abolish the latter. But the fact is that you do not need to be a landowner to vote. We didn’t simply forget to extent voting rights to unpropertied people when it comes to local elections.

Most people probably know this. We can probably chalk this second trip up to Greg O’Connor just garbling his arguments. Not something beyond the realms of imagination.

But then we get into the justification of the property franchise.