Talk:Make It 16 Incorporated v Attorney-General

Judgment/responses section

Just noting my intention to chuck in a judgment section at some point over the coming days which will go through the Supreme Court's judgment. Will have to make sure that responses section is kept tidy since once the bill is introduced, I can imagine it will have quite continuous developments after that point. Carolina2k22 • (talk) • (edits) 02:56, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Make It 16 Incorporated v Attorney-General/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Sammi Brie (talk · contribs) 02:28, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)
It is reasonably well written. a (prose, spelling, and grammar): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists): It is factually accurate and verifiable. a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR): d (copyvio and plagiarism): It is broad in its coverage. a (major aspects): b (focused): It follows the neutral point of view policy. Fair representation without bias: It is stable. No edit wars, etc.: It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate. a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
Overall: Pass/Fail:
· · ·

Welcome to GAN, Carolina2k22! Sourcing looks good. The main issue is copy; tweaking commas, splitting some long sentences, etc. There are some places where concision might be useful. 7-day hold. Ping me when the page is ready. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 02:28, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

Copy changes

Lead

• The first sentence is extraordinarily long at 86 words. Is there a way to split it?
• The comma is unneeded. User:Sammi Brie/Commas in sentences (CinS) will tell you more.
• Consider mentioning public opinion in the lead paragraph so that the lead summarizes the article's contents.

Background

• "September of 2019" change to "September 2019"
• Attorney-General David Parker publicly stated that his position was that the High Court's judgment to decline the declarations sought was correct, and that section 12 of the Bill of Rights settles any limitation on the voting age.
  • The comma is unneeded.
  • Should this read "Bill of Rights" or "Bill of Rights Act"?
• Make It 16, disagreeing with Doogue's judgment saying, "there was no good reason why they should be excluded", took The structure of this appositive would be improved by changing "saying," to "and saying".
• However, despite the court ruling that it was unjustified age discrimination, it stated that suffrage being extended to 16-year-olds was an issue "very much in the public arena already" and that it is "an intensely and quintessentially political issue involving the democratic process" and chose to exercise restraint and decline the applications for declarations of inconsistency. I feel like this sentence could be broken with a semicolon or period and new sentence after "process".

Judgment

• Make It 16 co-director Caeden Tipler commented to The New Zealand Herald stating: "A formal declaration from the Supreme Court would be a powerful message to Parliament that they should fix this breach of our rights,". In addition to the punctuation mangled at the end, I think it may be more concise to say ...stated to The New Zealand Herald, "A formal...
• Conversely, the Attorney-General argued that "the equivalent New Zealand jurisprudence [on declarations of inconsistency] is in its infancy", and that Court of Appeal's ruling... The second comma is not needed, but I think there should be a "the" before "Court of Appeal".
• In its assessment, the Supreme Court considered the arguments given and noted that it was "not persuaded it would be premature to make a declaration" and noted that the voting age had already been previously mentioned in the Royal Commission on the Electoral System in 1986, which stated that there was "a strong case" that could be made on lowering the voting age to 16, and recommended Parliament to "keep the voting age under review". This 75-word whopper of a sentence might merit splitting.
• However, Kós concurred with the court's majority on local elections, stating "a declaration of inconsistency must be made in relation to the provisions of the Local Electoral Act", he explained that his dissenting opinion on the age to vote for parliamentary elections does not apply to local elections as, "Those provisions stand alone, unaffected (and unprotected) by section 12 [of the Bill of Rights Act]. They are inconsistent with section 19, and the Attorney-General does not attempt to justify the inconsistency under section 5." What a whopper of a sentence. There should be a sentence split between "elections" and "stating". The comma after "local elections as" should be moved to be before the word "as"
• "persuasive", however, also noted that The first comma should be a semicolon, and there is also a missing subject.
• No comma after "is a declaration of inconsistency, not illegality" (CinS)

Responses

• as it a missing an "is"
• for the council to back the Make It 16 campaign and extending voting rights I'd use "extend" for tense consistency.

Sourcing and spot checks

Five citations were chosen at random out of 36.

Earwig's copyvio detector catches a content farm that copied the page from us (no concern there). Most of the rest are phrases like "the Bill of Rights Act" and "lowering the voting age to 16" along with a couple of quotes.

• 13: Sentence backs the first part of the sentence in re Moran: She said the Attorney-General had not given a good reason as to why the discrimination was justified and the High Court erred in agreeing with him. Y
• 22: Checks out to paragraph [65] in the Supreme Court judgment. Y
• 25: Accurately captures the heart of Kos's dissent. Y
• 27: Also accurately quoted. Y
• 31: He said the prime minister should focus on issues like youth crime rather than the voting age. Y

@Sammi Brie: Kia ora, thank you for your review, I appreciate it a lot! I've made the changes you've mentioned and redone the paragraph that mentioned the Porirua City Council's endorsement to be more inclusive of other councils. If you have any further suggestions, I would be glad to make them. Carolina2k22 • (talk) • (edits) 14:22, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

How to refer to judges?

In her GA review, Sammi Brie didn’t comment on how this article refers to judges. The article uses the legal convention of naming them as "Surname J" and I’m unaware that the MOS confirms this as acceptable. It’s certainly not a reader-centric approach. Firstly, you have to be aware of the convention or somehow figure out what the "J" (or "CJ" or "JJ") stands for. Secondly, and more importantly, readers would probably more interested in the judges common names than just their surnames. Thirdly, once the common names are used, it becomes more obvious that wikilinks from the prose section to their articles are missing (currently mostly just linked linked from the infobox). Schwede66 18:32, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

@Schwede66 Good catch. I thought that was acceptable, but Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Legal#Names of judges does say to write them out (the example is US-centric, but this is probably a good change for our readers). This isn't my topic area of expertise. Wikilinks would be good too. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 18:48, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

I hadn’t looked it up and was just going by what felt right. Schwede66 18:57, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

I did initially wonder about this but wasn't entirely sure. I'll go through and update this now. Carolina2k22 • (talk) • (edits) 02:36, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by SL93 (talk) 03:09, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

(

• Comment or view
• Article history

)

• ... that during November 2022 the Supreme Court of New Zealand ruled that the voting age of 18 was unjustified age discrimination in Make It 16 Inc v Attorney-General? Source: "A declaration is made that the provisions of the Electoral Act 1993 and of the Local Electoral Act 2001 which provide for a minimum voting age of 18 years are inconsistent with the right in s 19 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 to be free from discrimination on the basis of age; these inconsistencies have not been justified in terms of s 5 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act." http://www.nzlii.org/nz/cases/NZSC/2022/134.html
  • Reviewed:
  • Comment: Noting that this is my first WP:DYK nomination, I'll look into reviewing others, but I am relatively new to this process :) Thanks!

Improved to Good Article status by Carolina2k22 (talk). Self-nominated at 02:26, 3 January 2023 (UTC).

• Just noting that you don't have to review another nomination. You can, of course, give it a go if you wish, but it's not a requirement for the first five nominations. Schwede66 02:29, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

QPQ: None required.

Overall: Looks fine to me. BennyOnTheLoose (talk) 16:55, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Relevance of including public opinion in an article about a court judgement

I would like to call in to question how relevant it is to have a section on "Public opinion on the voting age" when it does not relate to the court case and subsequent judgement. Including opinion polls makes the article more about voting age reform overall and it distracts from the actual court judgment itself and it's implications; such information belongs more in an article such as Electoral reform in New Zealand or an article about the voting age. I think it would be far more prudent to have the article examine the implications of the judgement (e.g what a declaration of inconsistency actually means and what it's effect is) rather than opinion polling that relates to the subject matter of the judgment but not the court case and judgment itself. MangoMan11 (talk) 08:57, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

A detailed explanation of declaration of inconsistency is better suited for New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 and Taylor v Attorney-General rather than this those are where that is sourced from. I haven't read this article in detail in a while but there should be enough information to at least gauge what a declaration means or at least the information linking off to another article that explains this in detail as listed above.

I would say it might not be essential for relevancy and I can absolutely see what you mean, but it does add further social context to the court case. It is important to understand that court cases like these aren't purely just matters of the actual court judgment and its implications but are relatively significant beyond this socially. Extreme detail of what you're describing would probably be beyond the scope of relevancy, but a brief summary of the social support for the thing the court decision very much advocated for is definitely not a negative to keep in the article and will absolutely provide additional insight to readers reading this article years or decades from now who want to understand more about the court judgment itself and the social circumstances that the judgment was made in. Carolina2k22 • (talk) • (edits) 10:17, 3 December 2023 (UTC)