At sixteen, an Australian can leave school, hold down a job, pay income tax, drive a car on a learner's permit and, in some states, be tried in an adult court. What they cannot do is cast a vote for the people who make the laws that govern all of these things. It is time to fix that. Australia should lower the voting age to sixteen.

The most common objection is that sixteen-year-olds are too immature to vote responsibly. It is an argument that sounds sensible until you examine it. Maturity is not something that arrives on a birthday. Plenty of forty-year-olds vote on the basis of a slogan they saw on a bus, and plenty of sixteen-year-olds can explain the difference between a policy and a promise. If we are going to use maturity as a test, we would have to apply it to everyone, and nobody is seriously suggesting that.

Consider what we already trust young people to do. A sixteen-year-old who works twenty hours a week at a supermarket pays tax on every one of those hours. That tax funds roads, hospitals and schools. Yet the worker has no say in how it is spent. Taxation without representation was enough to start a revolution once; today we simply call it being a teenager.

Lowering the voting age is not a radical experiment. Austria has allowed sixteen-year-olds to vote in national elections since 2007. Scotland extended the vote to sixteen-year-olds for its independence referendum in 2014 and later for Scottish Parliament and local elections. Brazil and Argentina have done the same. In none of these places has democracy collapsed. In Austria, researchers found that first-time voters aged sixteen and seventeen turned out at rates comparable to, and sometimes higher than, voters in their twenties.

That last point matters, because voting is a habit. People who vote in the first election they are eligible for are far more likely to keep voting for the rest of their lives. At eighteen, many young Australians are in the middle of moving out of home, starting university or chasing their first full-time job. Sixteen-year-olds, by contrast, are mostly still at school, in a stable environment where civics is taught and where an election can be discussed in the classroom. If we want lifelong voters, sixteen is the better place to start.

There is also a simple question of fairness. The decisions made today about climate, housing and debt will be lived with longest by the youngest. A sixteen-year-old will spend sixty or seventy more years inside the consequences of this year's budget. Why should they be the one group with a direct stake in the future and no voice in shaping it?

Critics worry that young people will simply vote the way their parents do. Perhaps some will. Many adults vote the way their parents did, too. Others worry that sixteen-year-olds will be swayed by social media. That is a genuine concern, but it is a concern about every voter, not just the youngest, and the answer to it is better education, not exclusion.

Compulsory voting makes Australia's situation slightly different from other countries. A fair solution would be to make voting at sixteen and seventeen voluntary, with compulsory voting beginning at eighteen as it does now. This would invite young people into democracy rather than drag them.

We let sixteen-year-olds take on the responsibilities of adulthood one by one. It is strange, and a little insulting, to hand them the tax bill but not the ballot paper. If they are old enough to work for the country, they are old enough to help choose who runs it.