I believe everyone aged 18 and over, who is able to, should vote. I believe it’s our responsibility as citizens. I believe it should be a requirement of citizenship.
How you vote is your affair. You can cast an invalid vote to protest against the system. But I believe we should.
I talked about this in my maiden speech. This is my view, not my party’s.
The ancient Greeks, who gave birth to democracy, held that it was every citizen’s duty to participate in decision-making. Let’s have the discussion.
In 1893, New Zealand women were the first in the world to be granted the vote. That’s not long ago. My (and your ) ancestors fought for that right.
That achievement was the result of years of effort by suffrage campaigners. In 1891, 1892 and 1893 they compiled a series of massive petitions calling on Parliament to grant the vote to women. The biggest of them all, submitted on 28 July 1893, was signed by ‘Mary J. Carpenter and 25,519 others’ – about one in five New Zealand women at the time.
The petition contains the signatures of many leading suffragists and feminists, including Kate Sheppard, Marion Hatton, Rachel Reynolds, Ada Wells, Tailoresses’ Union leader Harriet Morison, writer Edith Grossman, and sisters Christina and Stella Henderson (whose younger sister, Elizabeth, then too young to sign, would later achieve fame as New Zealand’s first woman MP – under her married name, McCombs).
To mark Women’s Suffrage Day on 19 September, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage has made the names and address details of the women who signed the petition available as a searchable database on NZHistory so New Zealanders can search for family ties to this historic event.
‘Women’s suffrage is rightly celebrated as a great milestone in New Zealand history,’ says Neill Atkinson, Chief Historian at Manatu Taonga. When the governor signed a new Electoral Act into law on 19 September 1893, New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world to grant all women the right to vote in parliamentary elections. In most other democracies – notably Britain and the United States – women couldn’t vote until after the First World War. ‘New Zealand’s world leadership in women’s suffrage has become part of our national identity,’ says Atkinson.
I think that’s a great initiative. I’m proud to be a woman MP in our parliament. We’ve achieved 30% representation. MMP has been responsible for increasing that representation. Which is one of the reasons I support and will choose MMP when I cast my vote in the referendum on 26 November.
The right to vote is a precious thing. Let’s all exercise it. Wisely.
