21 Reasons to Vote No Way
Despite the dearth of media coverage and general discussion, Friday’s referendum will ask us a second question in addition to marriage equality; namely reducing the age at which candidates are eligible for election to the office of President from 35 to 21.
The proposal is contained in the Thirty-Fifth Amendment of the Constitution (Age of Eligibility for Election to the Office of President) Bill 2015.
The current Article 12.4.1° of the Constitution states:
Every citizen who has reached his thirty-fifth year of age is eligible for election to the office of President.
It is proposed to replace this with:
Every citizen who has reached the age of twenty-one years is eligible for election to the office of President.
I propose the following:
21 Things to Do instead of being President in your 20s:
- Get drunk.
- Get stoned.
- Get drunk and stoned.
- Go traveling.
- Win a scholarship and blow it by dropping out of college.
- Come back as a “mature” student.
- Waste a summer repeating exams and still fail.
- Walk out of your part-time job by throwing your apron on the floor after having an argument with the boss in the deep freeze.
- Learn a new language.
- Go to a country for a summer to learn the language and blow all your money in the first fortnight traveling.
- Get into a velcro costume, run and bounce on a trampoline and not stick to the wall and come home in a neck brace.
- Have a dysfunctional summer in Denmark.
- Wrestle and win back your stolen moped while still moving in traffic in a European capital.
- Get arrested.
- Break up with your boyfriend of 18 months because you don’t like his shoes.
- Buy yourself a super pair of rollerblades that cure a broken heart.
- Go out with someone kinda rough and realise twenty years later that they were probably a cocaine dealer.
- Stay up all night if you’ve an early flight in case you sleep through.
- Get your body pierced.
- Ignore all water safety rules by swimming in the pitch dark while under the influence.
- Have fun!
Then spend your 30s and early 40s correcting all of the above. Then when you’re “a tattered coat upon a stick,” consider running for President. A misspent youth is a well spent youth!
All suggestions and events depicted above are entirely fictitious. Any similarity to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. 🙂
PS , gotta to share this but please skip the awful ad: