‘The pandemic was this weird portal that showed us we didn’t need to live our lives the way we were living,” says Annabelle Parata Vaughan (Ngāi Tahu), who was studying politics at the University of Otago when the world slid into lockdown. “It halted many aspects of capitalism – you started working from home, you had rent freezes, pollution was decreasing.”
The pandemic highlighted things she and her peers believed were impossible. “We became motivated to take political action because we saw that systemic change was possible,” says Vaughan, who now has a masters degree and is the culture and political editor of Otago’s student magazine, Critic Te Ārohi.
This enforced change brought a reaction: under-25s turned out in the 2020 general election in rates never seen before. The Electoral Commission says the number of 18- to 24-year-olds who voted jumped by more than 43,000 compared to 2017, to 274,076. That’s an estimated 60.9% of eligible voters in that age group, compared with 50.1% in 2017 and 48% in 2014. The official turnout for all voters was 82.2%, the highest since 1999.
The youthful glow from the 2020 election can be attributed to many things. Bronwyn Hayward, professor of political science at the University of Canterbury, puts it down in part to controversial referenda being run at the same time – assisted dying and cannabis reform – and a series of school strikes over climate change in
