As per Cyclosarin’s comment at 7 and your response, one question is whether people tend to vote more conservatively as they get older. Assuming they do, your results could just reflect this fact.

But the real question is whether the cohorts of the 60’s and 70’s are less likely to vote Liberal at all ages compared to earlier generations. To do this, you’d need to compare their voting behaviour at the same ages. That is: how did the pre-Boomers vote at ages 20, 30, 40 and 50, compared to how the Gen X’s are voting at the same ages.

I don’t know if you’ve the data to answer the question though.

The Coaloppos have a quite a few deep-seated problems, two of which are quite serious.
(a) The first is the perception that they will say anything, reverse any position and grab any issue to gain power. This is the opposite to Mr Howard’s greatest political success story, which was convincing the gullibles for quite a long while that he was a conviction politician. Current Coaloppo cynical opportunism is the opposite of conviction politics and is basically unworkable over the long haul.
(b) The second problem for the Coaloppos is the high degree of consonance between perceptions of their political cynicism and reality.

The Labgubbies also have some deep-seated problems, three of which are:
(a) many global systems are close to broken
(b) there is bugger-all that the Labgubbies can do about it
(c) the likelihood that they will be blamed for any consequent pain. What did happen to Herbert Hoover and patterns of Republican voting in the thirties and forties, by the way?

We have a bit of the coyote and the roadrunner type problem here. This is where the coyote runs off the cliff and keeps running for a while before he looks down and it is game over. We have run off the cliff, most of us have an awful feeling that we have done something pretty fundamental, but most of us have yet to look down. The post coyote-lookdown events could well prove trend breakers.

Any signals of hope for the Coaloppo careerists on disjunct systems behaviour?

Try the one where, within the space of a year or so, the scientists have brought forward predictions of an ice-free north pole from some time about the end of this century to a fifty/fifty punt for this northern summer.

And if you think the Murray Darling Basin has water problems, have a good hard look at the water balances for many regions of China. Those Chinese water coyotes are belting full pace for the cliff edge. Five trends are coming together – increased demand, rapid groundwater depletion, rapid reduction of Himalayan glacial meltwater, changes in rainfall patterns and the reduction in the quality of available water because of pollution.

If I was a betting psephologist I would take anything better than fifty/fifty odds that the voting trends described above will be broken significantly within a generation.

This time, however, climate change is the defining issue of this generation – a bit like the cold war and anti-communism was in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and we all know how long one party was in power back then.

Labor’s problem is that it has gradually outsourced young voter recruitment to the Greens. Longer term, that could have the makings of its own train wreck and perhaps more quickly for ageing state governments increasingly dependent on optional second preferences.

I’d also like to see some thoughts to immigration levels when looking at the younger age cohorts. Typically they are in their 20s and 30s and the impact of changes in immigration policy should be discernible after allowing for the lags before citizenship and enrolment. While they may be mostly concentrated in a few safe ALP seats, the current record numbers are large enough to make a difference in some scenarios (eg Bennelong).

Howard is now gone so the predicament for the Libs is not as hopeless as it might seem – but they sure need to start by doing something about the general policy malaise which has hung over them for many years and still lingers since last Nov.

But the current crop of Lib leadership aspirants (who will try to bring the party forward) includes a few high-order opportunists who arrived (as unconvincing champions of the conservative cause) on the Liberal doorstop presenting themselves as “ready to lead”.But the public aren’t altogether mugs. They can see considerable insincerity on the current Opposition front bench and will continue to mark them down accordingly.

The Libs WILL eventually bring themselves back into contention and start to have some appeal to the broad middle group again – but the right leader, the right policies and the right attitude isn’t even on the horizon.
It’s going to be a long night.

DG, I have seen stuff on that very question only recently somewhere. I’ll have a scoot around today and see if I can find where it was.

How on Earth are the Coalition supposed to get more younger voters?

I think you’d be surprised. I think what the Ron Paul crazies showed recently is there’s a good 5 to 15% of young people who are at least receptive to a traditional liberal, small government leave-us-alone message. I think what Poss is getting at is the Liberal Party over the past 20 years haven’t bothered selling that message and have lost that 5 to 15% accordingly.

Is there any way to see if there is any correlation between the government you had as a teenager and the way you tend to vote in the future? Someone was talking to me about teenage rebellion against authority and how often some remnant of this rebellion held over into adulthood. I am not sure that I take this seriously – anecdotally, most of my friends were teenagers under Hawke and we are almost all Labor voters now – but is there a way of easily checking on this hypothesis?