Sixteen-year-olds are their parents’ responsibility

This was my column in The Malta Independent, yesterday.

The Labour Party has said that its ephemeral and unspecified “guarantee for youth” will be a sort of outreach programme that follows up on school-leavers who are not revealed by the official records to be working or studying.

“This is the guarantee we are giving. We will follow up the young people who do not remain at school after the age of 16 and who cannot be traced as employed or self-employed,” Joseph Muscat said on Tuesday.

Aside from the distinctly Big Brother ramifications of having your government hunt you down and call you in if you are 16 and don’t have a job or a place at college (if I were 16 and doing neither, I’d be tempted to give them the finger and point out that it’s none of their business), surely the Labour Party is forgetting something.

This is the parents’ job, and not the government’s.

Dealing with a 16-year-old who refuses to study or train beyond the mandatory legal requirement is the responsibility of his or her parents, not Joseph Muscat’s and his band of busybodies’.

What did I tell you about the Labour Party having far right political tendencies? Hunting down 16-year-olds who are the responsibility of their parents, to find out why they are doing nothing sensible with their lives, why they don’t have a job and why they are not training or studying, is screamingly, outrageously far right.

The only way you can go even farther to the right than that is by fining them or jailing them for refusing to do their duty and comply with the demand that they contribute to society, or by over-ruling parental authority to force them into military service. But Labour won’t do that, because on the matter of all things military, it swings to the 1970s left and the era of the CND badge.

Joseph keeps telling us he’s liberal. Well, actually he’s now stopped, because he thinks liberalism is composed of anything to do with sex and marriage, like divorce and homosexuality, when it’s not quite that at all.

But this business with the 16-year-olds is the polar opposite of a liberal policy, even if we take it that it’s a policy at all. The liberal view is that if a 16-year-old wants to sit on his butt and do nothing, he’s his parents’ problem and nobody else’s.

And when he turns 18, he will not be technically their problem anymore either, though in reality they’ll continue to worry. He will be his own problem, free to do nothing as he pleases and face the consequences of that. And does Joseph know why? It’s because this is now a free country, no thanks to Labour.

I find it very odd that Joseph Muscat hopes to appeal to first-time voters by promising to hunt them down if they don’t work or study. When young people are trying so hard to shake off their parents’ nagging, the last thing that’s going to appeal to them is the threat of having the new prime minister on their case. “Give me your vote, and I swear I’ll nag you to death if you don’t behave.”

Liberals find repugnant the very idea of the state sniffing through the records to find out what individual 16-year-olds are doing with themselves, then summoning them to face a barrage of questioning about their private and non-criminal behaviour.

Compiling anonymous statistics about the numbers of young people in work or at university is one thing. Actually combing through the records to identify perceived defaulters by name, address and telephone number and calling them in for supervision and questions is another. It is outrageous.

Clearly, Joseph Muscat and his dinosaur network do not feel the same way because they have no true liberal soul. If I were a 16-year-old in that position, I would tell the government where to stuff its concern and how to stay out of my life (but I have said that already).

And if I were the parent of a 16-year-old who has received a summons from Joseph’s government to find out why he is neither working nor studying, I would march straight to the Busybody Department in the Ministry of Prying, waggle their letter in their face and demand that they stay out of my business as a parent or receive a letter from my lawyer.

The state can only interfere in the care of minors – and 16-year-olds are minors – if their parents are proved to be incompetent and they are at risk. There are several legal hoops to jump through before that can happen. The state cannot just home in on minors and question them about their lives and intentions.

Legally speaking, the agents of the state must first go through the parents. They cannot deal with 16-year-olds directly, because, as we have seen, those 16-year-olds are neither legally independent nor wards of the state.

And here we come to the crux of the matter. The state cannot deal with 16-year-olds in a vacuum anyway. It has to go through their parents not only for legal reasons but also because the sort of parents who produce children with delinquent tendencies cannot be permitted to go on thinking that they have no responsibilities towards them beyond feeding them and putting a roof over their head.

The way Joseph Muscat now speaks about 16-year-olds is as though he has wiped their parents out of the equation altogether, even though almost all 16-year-olds live with their parents and remain their wards. I have listened to everything he’s said about the subject and not once have I heard him say “together with their parents” or “where parents cannot cope, we will help out”. No, it’s 100% usurpation or substitution by the state of the parental role.

Some parents might like this, but they are the problem parents mentioned here. Others would rather they be allowed to look after their own children without Joseph Muscat and Karmenu il-Guy sending agents to find out why Byon or Camilla haven’t gone to sixth form college yet.

Schooling is mandatory at law only up to the age of 16. After that point, the state loses the legal right to interfere.

It’s going to be on a “voluntary basis”, Muscat said. Well, indeed – what’s the alternative if not the Benito Mussolini –style option of penalising them if they refuse to comply in working or studying?

They are free to neither work nor study. It doesn’t mean they should get a social security cheque for bumming around, but if their parents or others are willing to support them, it really is no one else’s business.

Many of these 16-year-olds with attitude problems have been raised by women who don’t work or study either, and have imbibed from them their outlook on life and their lack of motivation. They see their mothers supported by their fathers or by the state for doing nothing much, and they can’t understand why they should be any different.

Joseph Muscat should be consistent. If he’s going to hunt down the 16-year-olds who neither work nor study, then he should do the same with everyone else, including their mothers. Sixteen-year-olds are not a special case. But he should be hunting down no one at all for the purpose of interfering in their lives, because it’s not the state’s business to do that.

An outreach programme, in which you set up the service, advertise it, and wait for 16-year-olds to come to you, is just fine and useful. It is to be recommended. But starting off from the decision, and what’s more, “guaranteeing” it, that all 16-year-olds in that situation will be identified one by one and chased down, is far-right thinking and undesirable.

It is the identifying and the hunting down in themselves that are illiberal and invasive. To say that compliance will be voluntary after that point is irrelevant.

Muscat simply does not understand that you can’t be liberal and track people down to tell them what to do with themselves. Worse still, by singling out 16-year-olds as special cases, he betrays his view of that age group as somehow inferior and subject to patronising interference in a way that their mothers are not.

If Joseph Muscat were to suggest tracking down women who neither work nor study, he would find himself with a rocket up his nether regions, but he thinks it’s all right to patronise and police young people in a way he would never dare do to those who brought them up.