KEY POINTS:
In a Catherine Cookson novel, Madeleine Askwith would be described as "headstrong".
Her parents call her independent and opinionated. She's faintly contemptuous of scenesters, wary of posers and scathing about teenage girl bitchiness. She drinks, but not much. She began around 13 and went through a bingeing phase, but she's over that.
She recently read two Bryce Courtenays, Man Booker winner DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little ("good") and a Jodi Picoult ("I didn't like that. It was dumb.") She likes rock, but not exclusively.
She's smart, good-looking, was popular at school, and displays the work-in-progress worldliness of a confident, well-read young woman.
Madeleine, or Maddy, is 17 going on 27. "I've felt like an adult for ages."
The year just gone, she ran the family home in Coromandel while both parents worked in Auckland. Her dad, Chris, is a builder, and her mum, Sue, has been based there as a public nurse for four years, coming home every second weekend and holidays.
Maddy worked 35-hour weeks at Umu, a trendy cafe, and nailed fifth form, topping her year.
On May 12, she'll turn 18 and become one of the 190,000-195,000 New Zealanders who, by September 30, will have come of voting age since the 2005 general election. This year, roughly one in 15 (6 per cent) of eligible voters will be first-timers.
What do they care about? What will sway them? Will they bother to vote?
Maddy's mind is already made up. "I'll vote Green. I don't know that much, but I just like the ideas. Freedom of speech... I think most kids from here will vote for them because they think it'll mean legalising weed."
She likes Jeanette Fitzsimons and Helen Clark "seems cool. She doesn't fuss about things, even though she gets a lot of flak for being not gorgeous."
Maddy's parents are staunchly Labour-Green. Sue is a self-described bleeding heart liberal: "I'm probably not so environmental; my views are socialist, it's people I care about.
"I once said to Maddy I'd disown her if she voted National... of course, you want your children to be independent and free thinkers." She pauses. "I would just say to her the issues that are important to her are important."
What's important to Maddy reflects, inevitably, her background and situation. Born 17 years after her sister, she was raised as an only child. "I just got really spoilt ... I got whatever I wanted."
Her parents, ex-hippies who lived in a self-sufficient commune, made sure her horizons were broadened.
"I've had quite a privileged upbringing for this area, been exposed to a lot more - arts and literature, read a lot of books and gone to movies. My parents took me to the opera, even if I didn't want to go. They pushed me quite a lot at school when I was younger. Some of the kids here have never seen a film festival movie or read a novel."
Life is in no hurry in the Coromandel, except for the summer holidaymaker rush. The population is markedly older and whiter and less likely to have formal qualifications than national averages. Coromandel is traditionally National. Greens co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons narrowly won the seat in 1999, but lost it to National's Sandra Goudie last election.
Maddy wrote an essay skewering the myth Coromandel Peninsula is all flower-power hippysville, especially for the young. "It's really mainstream here. There's not enough people for people to be different. It's not that they all have to stick to one thing - half of it is they don't care. I'm probably the only person in town who has black skinny jeans, which is like a uniform in Auckland."
And if you don't fit in, life can be brutal. "It's quite hard here for people who are, or who want to be, different."
For Year 12, she shifted from Coromandel Area School to Auckland's Western Springs College. She found it cliquey. "It was really hard to adjust. They've got all these buzzwords and it's like, 'What's an emo?!' There's just gangstas down here and what they'd call [fashion chain] Supre sluts."
And while Western Springs gangstas ape the look and aggro-posturing of their LA teen gang models, the Coromandel gangstas randomly bash people.
"It's quite bad with the whole gangsta thing here: people my age who have nothing better to do than just hang around town and get wasted and beat people up."
Maddy considers the roots of gangsta violence. "It's three things: their parents hitting them, drugs and alcohol and the gangsta thing from America. Because there's nothing else to do, they all get into smoking weed, just getting wasted, living that wasted lifestyle.
"It's meant to be a hippy town but psychedelic drugs aren't available: it's just P and weed. I don't think it's P that's made them violent: they can't really afford it. But weed is a bad thing, because everyone gets dopey and lazy and they can't be bothered; then they get drunk and angry."
Green MP Sue Bradford's so-called "anti-smacking" bill, which removed the "reasonable force" defence in child violence cases, was a step in the right direction, Maddy believes.
"It's pretty obvious where the line is: if you're leaving a mark that's too far. If you're just giving a smack, it should just give kids a little fright, not hurt them. I think they need to do something else about violence. So many people here are so violent probably because their families are so violent."
Perhaps parenting classes would help. And giving kids an incentive to stay in school. "Lots of kids drop out of school, they don't see the point."
Bradford's bill, passed into law last winter, reinforced Maddy's Green leaning. So did the party's campaign to raise (ideally abolish) minimum youth rates. At $13.50 an hour gross, Maddy knows she's on good pay for her age, but she struggles to save. She's reconciled to a student loan for the four-year bachelor of design course at Unitec she begins in March. Her parents, whose earnings disqualify her from a student allowance, will help but with fees of $5700 a year plus living expenses, Maddy expects to rack up around $40,000 of debt.
"I don't stress out about it. I do want to go overseas after, and you get interest when you go overseas, but I don't want to hang around here until I pay it off."
She's thinking of becoming a photojournalist. "I'm aiming high. Rolling Stone maybe," she grins. "The loan will be paid off in no time."
But she knows of others who've been put off tertiary studies because of student loans.
Young people are often maligned as apolitical and apathetic, but Maddy says political engagement is more to do with parental role models.
Lessons on MMP at school (she wasn't taught about the system), a free gig carrying political messages, and ads on the radio could reach more youth. Teenagers with parents who don't care, she predicts, "will grow up and not care either; not because they're teenagers but because they've never really talked about it, nobody's shown them how it affects them directly. They can't see how it changes things for you."
