Re: Suck it up Australia,...
Combat Wombat. Thanks for your reply.
I suspect that the truth is more nuanced than either of us first thought.
The election data from the ABC (Vote Compass?), is self selected. It may be that it is biased in favour of the old and the young, compared to the majority of the population. Older people, in spite of their perceived under-utilisation of technology have more time to fill this stuff in. Younger people may have the time, and are generally more likely to engage with social technology.
When I looked at Vote Compass Link ABC Important Issues my immediate reaction was that the economy was much more important to all respondents than asylum seekers. The young and old had ranked similarly on asylum seekers ahead of the 35-54 demographic. Broadband was generally of less importance than asylum seekers; but as we might expect, was considered to be more important to those aged 18-34. These statistics are based on what the respondent thought was important, and not their actual opinion on each topic.
There is more information on Vote Compass data by importance here: Link ABC
If we look at the ABS age demographic date Link ABS it shows that of those who were able to vote only ~19% of them were over 64, so other issues than the perceived biases of older people about migrants were more likely to have influenced the result. It would seem that what got Abbot over the line was the economy. If we do take the ABC data as valid, the economy was of much more importance to retirees (This might support your "getting the most out of their retirement" idea).
If we ignore any political biases that we may have, the implied perception that Labor are bad economic managers could be thought ironic when we consider the LNPs indifferent performance in this area. One of the more inspired tactics of the previous Howard Governments was to tell us how well the economy was going and then to reinforce this by repaying our heavily taxed dollars to the aspirational (West Sydney?) voter as "middle class welfare".
A cynical person, like me, might think that what got the LNP over the line was actually Murdock's media.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
