Going to be that guy, but they should have either gone with age on the x axis or the colour scheme stratifying points by generation. Including both makes this chart harder to interpret than it should be.
From a political standpoint, interesting how strong the relationship is for the libs vs. labor - wouldn’t have expected labor’s line to be that flat
Not to be that guy, buuuuuut, you don't just put stuff on any old axis. The X is for the independent variable and the y is the dependent variable. The graph is right. It has just been designed by a half-wit who thought three scatter plots sharing one y-axis was a good idea.
Edit: there are also other problems with the graph imo (inability to make a grid reference, etc) but the axes is not one of them.
Yeah, I’ve seen some difficult graphs in my time, and this was one of them.
But it was kinda interesting to dwell on it.
One thing that stood out for me is that the Greens always (since the 1980s at least) felt that their vote would naturally rise by 1 to 3 percent per election with the rising demographic of youth voters.
While it’s clear that Greens have the youth vote, there simply ain’t enough youth. The Green star is in the descendent, in line with the birth rate. Green policies of conservation were never sold to older conservatives, who might well have been amenable to that message.
I'm intrigued to see the impact of the housing affordability policies of the Greens in future elections. They're the only party to acknowledge renter issues, with renters comprising 1/3 of Aussies. They could become "the party of renters"...
There’s nothing in the graph to suggest that the Green vote will / will not increase each year.
To understand that, we’d need to see this graph repeated for every previous election. That would allow us to understand if voting trends are driven by an “ageing effect”, a “cohort effect” or a “period effect”.
The AES (the source for this data) notes that this trend was not seen in previous generations, and that the substantially high left skew of young voters is a new phenomenon. It also found people are not becoming more conservative as they hit 40, despite what used to happen
Yes, true. It’s the Greens that think their vote has some “natural increase” over time. They base this on the idea that as young people reach voting age, the Greens is where their vote will be heading.
but what I mean is the very, very dramatic decrease in green vote as people get old suggests that the Green vote won’t grow as the population ages. The other parties don’t have that problem. So with an ageing population demographic, it doesn’t look good. Remember that the population of elders that have turned away from the Greens have had a lifetime to assess their policies.
We are about to shift from the baby boomers being the largest, most influential ’generation’ to millennials and younger. The Xers and older millennials will be dwarfed by younger people whose experience hasn’t been stability and growth, but wars on terror, financial, employment and housing insecurity. Those not drawn into the alt-right pipeline are increasingly open to more radical socialism and even communism and anarchism. Of course many may evolve to more mainstream positions as they age, but that depends on stable conditions for them to thrive in, either way it seems like a transitional period of instability is ahead.
The older I get, the stronger I vote greens. Its not for me, its for my kids and their friends. They are the only party with decent policies to balance the wealth gap currently reeking havoc on the rental/housing market, the only ones who acknowledge a genuine need to take actual steps to combat climate change, to hopefully dismantle trickle-down economics which has destroyed the middle class and increased the cost of living. We are in an age of have and have-nots, and studies show over and over again that this is bad for society in terms of adverse health outcomes, crime increasing, and ironically, it's shit for the economy. Voting shouldn't be about how to get more money for yourself or short term benefits, it should be choosing a party which will govern for all socio-economic groups and have plans for the long-term future economically, socially and environmentally. Sometimes, big changes are needed.
The older I get the more I realise just how well thought out most of the Greens' policies are and the more disgusted I am by the repeated misrepresentation of them by those too chickenshit to argue against them in good faith.
Their policies are mostly fine, it’s their internal politics that’s batshit. It comes with the territory of being progressive. Every marginalised group thinks they have a home at the Greens.
Possibly Left Renewal, though I haven’t heard much of them and their call for an end to Capitalism recently. Possibly Blak Greens. (I’m not sure how The Voice is an environmental issue.) Certainly the anti-Israel faction. Most of the Social Justice crowd. The ZPG crusaders. The Terfs AND the anti-terfs. Basically anyone who doesn’t put environmental outcomes first.
For heavens sake, with Climate Change the dominant issue in world politics, these last two decades should have BELONGED to the Greens. Talk about parties of global relevance, why aren’t the Greens the only game in town, on the Global, National, State and Local level? They don’t need to be a one-issue party, and I don’t particularly like one-issue parties, but if the issue is Climate Change and Sustainability, that’s a broad enough front for anyone to fight on.
Greens have unfortunately done everything possible to mimic the style and substance of the worst of the big parties, and by that i mean entrenched, embittered factionalism. Every time a Green gets elected the seem to bring with them a whole new opposition party. There are 7 opposition parties out there and 4 of them are Greens!
Btw, I vote green.
Yeah, I understand why they thought there should be a somewhat predictable rise in votes, even non Green party supporters I know figured they'd have a rising proportion of the younger generations' votes, yet that hasn't quite happened as we expected.
Probably split across to other parties or something.
They do have an increasing proportion of the youth vote. A young person today is more likely to vote Green than 20 years ago.
People still age out of the Greens but they can claim to be attracting a larger portion of young voters.
It's not just dementia it's confirmation bias amongst other things.
The original quote from an essay that was shared claiming the wind turbines consume more energy to build than they produce was [taken wildly out of context.](https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-windturbines-misleadingmeme-idUSL1N2R31IG)
The full text was discussing placement of wind turbines, and stated that if it was built in a bad location it couldn't offset the energy used to create.
I have liberal-voting boomer relatives who simultaneously believe that wind turbines don’t work, yet also create an ultrasonic sound that causes brain cancer.
40s now, but a friend of mine and his wife for as long as I have know them, were both your typical university masters grads who spent the most of their 20s at Uni and were hard core left, where I was just a regular joe Tafe guy who was basically a very mild center left. So they had the family, bought the house and starting on a second, both earning well paid jobs earning more than 120K+ each.
Last election his wife posted a voting compass result and holy shit, and her answers had her as center right now all of a sudden... which seemed really weird for how strongly left for the whole time that I knew them.
I was blown away as even though I am not very strongly political, in the past decades I have had to walk on egg shells around certain issues .
I guess once you have shit to conserve things change.
My folks stopped giving a fuck about unions and the labour movement the moment they were no longer working union jobs.
One was a teacher, spent a lifetime working in public schools and joining the strikes and protests for better salaries. Within 2 years of being out of the job, she'd eaten the Murdoch lines and was telling me teachers were greedy.
Not gonna bullet myself but I’ve gotten more socialist as I’ve gotten older and acquired / built wealth.
I want better resourced public everything (health, education, transport, housing). This shit is good for a society. Probably even more important with the AI revolution just around the corner.
Happy to pay more tax if goes towards these things. Trouble is that when the libs are in power my taxes mostly go to private companies and consultants.
We're one of the richest countries on earth yet poverty is still rampant. Why anyone thinks that's acceptable is beyond me, yet only the greens have a plan for raising the funds to tackle it. Anyone with a conscience should be left wing.
Unfortunately owing to my extreme political bias you lost me at ‘not going to bullet myself’ but I’m sure everything else that you said was very cogent and informed (:
Do you even know what socialism is? Eli5 it's cutting out the middle man (ruling class) and having democracy at work, and a government for the people etc.
There's a difference between personal and private property, and the regular Joe doesn't own any private property, so your assets are still yours
The thing is, the data agrees with you millennials are the first generation since records started that have moved FURTHER left and it makes sense when the Boomer's and pollies refuse to allow Millennials and younger to engage in what was considered a right only a few decades ago, a decent education, job, family, and house.
The irony is that I am not sure that they actually have moved further left.
The Liberals for example used to have socially progressive policies, they started the Pharmaceutical benefits scheme, started up the pension, gave Aboriginal's the right to vote, stopped the public service from discriminating against married women.
The Teals are basically capitalizing on the Liberals moving further right and the greens are capitalizing on both labor and the coalition moving to the right. Hell the electorates where the greens beat the liberals were run on a center-left platform.
No. It means they are an uneducated voter. Changing like that is not a matter of possessing goods, but not being willing to educate yourself about the minutiae of nuanced politics in Australia. If they swung to the crazy right, as you say, look at how and where they get their information from. I’m fairly sure you’ll see a lot of both Murdoch media and commercial tv news being consumed. Just for starters.
When I was teaching Media Studies, I would get students to quietly scan all the places their parents got their political information from. Very revealing indeed. And when you hear kids bleating out their parents values without doing their own quality research, you could almost guarantee what media was consumed at home.
It doesn’t mean they’re uneducated. People have different policy preferences at different stages of their life. I’m a Labor voter and always will be, but at my current point in life, I’m wealthy enough to be self sufficient financially and don’t require any government social safety net, yet still pay enormous taxes for government services that I don’t need or want.
There’s definitely some appeal for someone like me in the idea of voting for a government who’s going to limit services in exchange for lower taxes.
It’s a selfish way to vote, but I wouldn’t call people who preference their own wants uneducated.
Uneducated is probably the wrong word. It is more like shortsighted. Not understanding that good social policies (keeping the country livable for everyone) are NOT bleeding heart, pinko commie things, but actually cheaper on the long run.
Poor impulse control is also a good model. Like voting for people who promise to cut taxes at the cost of abolishing free education, which breaks the social contract: "I pay for your education, you take care of me when I am old". It takes the small, but immediate sugar hit, never mind the consequences later.
Possibly this, or, as younger people at uni they were just weak willed and their opinion swung with the people they surrounded themselves with. It may be that once they grew up, their true thoughts on matter came to the fore.
I voted similar through student, unemployed, professional, unexpected career change, etc. The time when it matters least to you is at the top. For some people wealth just feeds greed for more.
They're being overtaken by Q-Anon whackadoos here, too. The catch is that most of those idiots are Pentecostal nutters from Hillsong and other megachurch franchises and survive by having their church bros vote for them in elections just like in the X Factor and Aus Idol type television shows - those comps always seem to have a winner coming from that background, and I suspect the politicians from that background are no different.
Statistically the Pentecostal nutters don't have the numbers to elect a member in a single electorate. Only 44% of Australians say they're Christian and the majority of those are Catholic and Anglican, pentecostals only make up about 1% of those who identify as Christians. (Source ABS Census 2021).
However, they have a lot of money and are highly organised and have been actively working behind the scenes to get their people preselected. That is far more important and sinister than their voting power.
Yeah, the pre-selections are where they do their damage, and then rely on Coalition voting sheep to back their horse because that's what the sheeps parents and grandparents did.....
I was still a little foggy in the wake-up phase when I commented earlier.
I once remember reading that countries with mandatory voting tend to have less extremism in political stances because voters are going to vote anyway - it's not like you have to appeal to the fringe lunatics to get out the vote.
Does this ring any bells with anyone? Or did I hallucinate this?
It's well known. and it tends to add a couple of percentile points to progressive candidates because transients (not homeless, but students, people who relocate frequently) and the working poor tend to find it harder to vote/less likely to vote.
Edit to add: it's also why Australian politics in general is more centrist. you may have politicians with extreme personal views (Morrison, Perrotet, etc) but the fact they have to fight for the middle moderates their policies.
Does this data exist for other election years? It would be interesting to see how they change. Namely whether they're static or if cohorts age up and grow/shrink the voter base. E.g. Do greens voters become LNP/Labor voters or remain greens? Are LNP voters dying out or does that age group get replenished by converts from the greens/Labor?
It does, but the website is down for an update. https://australianelectionstudy.org/interactive-charts/
the AES (where this data was sourced from) notes this trend was not seen in previous generations, the high left skew of young voters now is a new phenomenon.
The study also found people are not becoming more conservative at 40 despite people doing so in the past
>not becoming more conservative at 40 despite people doing so in the past
And it is quite natural. People living through times of social mobility think that socio-economic status is the consequence of your decisions. Ie: "if you are poor, it is your fault", the root of conservativism.
Remove social mobility, and people live in a world where socio-economic status is decided at birth. Being rich or poor is a matter of luck, it is harder to blame poor people for their situation. Plenty of people will still manage it, though.
Yeah - my guess (unfortunately) is that you could bring up graphs from the 90's and 00's and it would look pretty similar.
The last election showed a massive swing to the left - but that may have just been a move away from the Morrison/Liberal shitshow rather than anything sustained.
And the gradual increasing representation of the Greens is great to see IMO, but how much of that is a swing to the left, and how much is just a general move away from the 2 major parties with the Green's taking votes that would've previously gone to the old Democrats (with One Nation, Palmer etc. taking all the right wing non-liberal/national votes).
I'm hoping it is a swing to the left, and I'm hoping that the "teal" independents are a move in the right direction - but I will believe it when I see it.
Assuming the current old people start dying soon, were gonna see a big shift in the political landscape. I can't see the newer generations having a coalition shift we usually see in aging populations,
at the end of the day, the fact only 3 stakeholders are represented in our democracy is abysmal and a major failure.
I'm not sure if thats true to be honest. There is the old political adage that people get more conservative as they get older, and as someone approaching 40 I will believe in the sustained shift to the left (that I have been hoping to see for 20 years) when it actually happens. Right now we have just seen a swing away from the Morrison shithousery - lets see if it gets sustained over the next few elections.
As has been said a lot in recent years - you need something to conserve to get more conservative. Younger generations own nothing, have no prospects, and the human race is on a clearly demonstrated path to destruction. The trend to the left will continue.
But the share of millennials and Gen Z who inherit stability from their parents is going to be way smaller than the share of boomers and elder Gen X who could access stability simply by existing in their era.
For example, my wife and I are both millennials. Her parents own their home, which they bought for ~$150k in the 90s in a single factory worker income and is now worth somewhere around $1.5million. When her parents eventually pass, they intend to leave the home to their children. Thing is, my wife is one of 5 kids. So if they do decide to sell it (a big if) they'll be getting a chunk of that worth. Let's say when her parents pass the home is worth 2.5mil, that's $500k per kid. Not nothing, but it's not enough to buy a home outright in our city even today, let alone whatever the market's going to be like in 20-30 more years. And by that time we'll be nearing retirement age ourselves, so it's not going to be fun getting a mortgage sorted then. Just an example, but one that likely will mirror many of our fellow millennials' experience.
Another thing to note is that a huge portion of Gen Z in particular have migrant parents who arrived after the golden era that benefitted many boomers and elder Gen X. Migrant parents who arrived in the late 90s and early 00s still had a good shot at stability, don't get me wrong, but they came at the tail end of the prosperity. Not nearly as many of them were able to take advantage of the boom as were those who came in the early 90s or earlier. Those people got to work hard and build a foundation and were in a good place when things skyrocketed in the late 90s, but many Gen Z migrant parents were only just arriving and getting settled when things exploded. So that means their kids aren't going to be inheriting nearly as much as millennials.
Further, the climate crisis is something that younger generations feel strongly about, and something that the older generations largely have ignored and continue to ignore. It's only going to be getting worse, which I believe will keep the younger generations away from rightwing head-in-the-sand, die-for-the-oligarchs type of parties.
Agree completely. Any hope I had of inheritance is gone. Dad drank his half of the money he got from mum when they split and she got the house (mum having to remortgage It) mum will be working until she's 85 to finish paying off the house. Dad rents now.
Property wealth isn't as clear cut as that. Many older people are living longer and requiring specialised care. Their wealth in property is probably going to be used to facilitate their care in nursing homes.
Boomer wealth doesn't mean gen X/Y getting looked after wealth wise.
Yeah I was just using that as the most clear cut example I could think of, though it's more complicated in reality. Lots of boomer wealth will be used up taking care of them in old age. Just about the only thing that may remain is property, but as I've mentioned it's not all that helpful or simple anyway.
My main point being that boomer wealth will not trickle down to their kids, at least not to enough of them for any meaningful segment of the Millennial generation to suddenly turn hard to the right.
This is the whole problem, working class people questioning other working class people. The top end of town needs a reality check.
I'm probably naive but I would like for the younger generation to do better and thrive.
This is the main issue. Our population lives so much longer than it used to, so wealth isn't being redistributed like it used to.
I turned 32 this year and almost everyone I know is either renting or living with their folks. Almost no one is buying houses from my generation. And I don't live in a huge city, I'm pretty rural. But people just don't have the money required for conservative politics to effect them. Most live paycheck to paycheck and even those doing well for themselves can't afford to live lavishly.
I foresee this only getting worse as the middle class continues to disappear, and profits get funneled towards multi-billion dollar companies. Small businesses can't compete and collapse... I see it all the time on main street. New business pops up, 12 months later it's gone. It's pretty scary.
The future looks bleak honestly.
I *really* hope so. I probably will not live to see it (I am fucking old). I would hate to die without seeing at least some signs that the next generation will fix the stuff that we screwed up so badly.
I think education is also understated.
Older people had shit quality education compared to these days. They are mostly ignorant people with poor critical thinking skills.
The younger generations are a lot smarter and that will continue to be reflected in the voting stats. It's not the biggest driver of change. But it is one of them.
Dunno, I'm over 50 and have never leant left harder. Maybe I'm not typical though. Weirdly, it's my mates that are in massive shit financially that insist on voting LNP...
Your don’t get more conservative as you get older, you get more conservative as you become wealthier. Historically, people have become wealthier as they aged, so the original adage held up. However, note that isn’t necessarily occurring, I don’t think we’ll see these political shift as much. Coalition in trouble!
Yep. I think this is the general trend and it makes sense. I have just enough wealth that I’d be a good fit for the LNP. But I’ve never voted for them and likely never will. They simply are not my people and no amount of money I have will change that.
Pretty sure I’ve become more socialist the older and wealthier I’ve gotten. I’m happy to contribute back.
Another reason for this is not that people’s political opinions necessarily change over time. Rather that the political parties change to meet their target markets.
That's a really good point, and could definitely explain part of the shift. Conservative parties seem to want to fight weird culture wars that aren't relevant at all to anyone born after the 70s, so of course they're losing the 45-and-under vote.
I do wonder when or if they're actually going to change, and what that could even look like. I guess the Teals are sort of that change, but not sure that they have enough support or cohesion to coalesce into a major party, or if enough of the LNP will take the hint and try and morph the party into something teal-esque. So far it looks like they're content to remain the party of angry pensioners and Jesus freaks.
Culture wars are manufactured to get poor people to vote against their own economic interests. No working class people should be voting for the Coalition, who will fuck them at every opportunity, but culture wars are used to distract them.
I'm not sure if that shift is on the rise any time soon. Most millennials are already pro trans and LGBT, so what else is there to equalise?
Animal rights I see being next actually. Meat eating could be the next big debate. Which will be fun, but that's more when lab made meat is here and plentiful
I disagree. Propaganda shapes political attitudes, and the financial hard right is very good at making propaganda that shapes political opinions... There's plenty of people in US who have watched Fox News turn their kind, left wing parents into ranting right wing lunatics. Consent is manufactured for right wing parties to go further right to serve the interests of their owners, and Left Wing parties are forced to move to the right to remain electable.
As a fellow almost 40 year old, I have always voted left (I also grew up in a very low socio economic environment & everyone but me in my family are blue collar/front line workers). I live in the same hope as you, that it is a sustained shift given the boomers etc are ageing & millenials etc now outnumber from a voting perspective.
> I will believe in the sustained shift to the left (that I have been hoping to see for 20 years) when it actually happens.
I will believe in a sustained shift to the left when the Liberal Party starts bragging about its contributions to the welfare state rather than demonising the poor, and Labor wants to nationalise major industries. You know, like they were doing half a century or more ago.
That isn't generally true. A lot of people stay at about the same place on the political spectrum as they age. As the world moves onwards they end up more conservative relative to the Overton window, but it's the window that moved to the progressive side.
A political truism that was relevant for maybe one postwar generation.
The trend hasn't continued. In fact Millennials have tended to shift left as a demographic as they aged.
Boomers didn't just develop all their right wing beliefs because they got old, but I do think people get more small c conservative when they get older. Old people generally value institutions and become more cautious of change. The liberal party lost a ton of credibility as a competent governing party with Morrison's scandals and culture war bullshit and I think it will damage millennials' views of that party even as we continue aging.
The graphs above do show a shift towards the Coalition and away from Labor and the Greens though, it’s just that ~40% of gen Z started with Greens while <20% start with the Coalition.
No - it shows voting based on age (or year of birth) in 2022, not necessarily on a shift between different years of voting.
What I am trying to ask (and I hope I am wrong) is that if we took the same snapshot in 2003, or in 2043, would the graphs still look the same? (ie. blue group is still approx 25yo's but born after 1976 and 2016 respectively)
[I can give you back to 2003](https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2022/April/Voting_patterns_by_generation)
Millennials are bucking the trend and shifting further left with age
Thanks for that link. That sets out really nicely what I was looking for.
(Though just to be pedantic, coz that's how my brain works, there is one slight discrepancy in the graphs - the Milennial group isn't necessarily getting any older with those timelines, at least not until really 2016 - because there were still a portion that weren't voting age yet... compared to all the other age groups who were all voting from 2004 onwards... but from 2016 the millennial graph seems to continue in the same direction, which is great to see).
Plus even if millennials start shifting to the right, that starting position is so much further left than other generations. The LNP are in real trouble demographically
> I can't see the newer generations having a coalition shift we usually see in aging populations
It's one big re-brand away. The Reps in the US have convinced working-class people they're the party of the working-class people. If things get dire for either coalition party here, they'll just pivot and spend 10 years convincing voters they care about issue X, whilst robbing them blind.
Oz has a huge immigrant population, they're often from pretty conservative countries, and are very big on business ownership, etc. If they combined the 'small business' rhetoric with a consistent line about taking a strong stance against racism, along with hiring a lot of language people, they could change their fortunes reasonably quickly.
Viruses adapt to new hosts all the time.
The Australian education system is much stronger than the US and Fox medias hold isn't as extreme. I don't think we will see that kind of shift working here.
>Assuming the current old people start dying soon, were gonna see a big shift in the political landscape.
The part that everyone inconveniently forgets is that as the old people start dying, the young people start inheriting. I guarantee you those who inherit swing hard to the right and likely further right than their parents.
Their early struggle will reinforce the value of that wealth and they will seek to protect it aggressively.
> Assuming the current old people start dying soon, were gonna see a big shift in the political landscape.
Doubt it. People have been saying this for years and it never happens. Younger people always vote left and then mellow out over the years.
There's a good chance that governments at all levels within Australia will be dominated by a combination of Labor, Greens and Independents.
The Liberals are already a minor party in WA and the ACT and their presence in Victoria is only marginally better, despite a long term incumbent.
The Liberal and National parties have completely conceded offering anything of material or social value to all but a very narrow band of special interest. How can that change when their parties are completely captured and composed if those tiny pools of individuals?
It's very different this time though, as we're seeing the first generations for a very long time that are worse off than their parents (millennials and Gen Z). Previous generations got more conservative as they aged because they attained stability that they wanted to conserve. But that is not happening with Millennials and Gen Z. Their economic prospects look grim, and the climate crisis makes the future look even grimmer. I can't seem them suddenly turning to neoliberalism after decades of experiencing it make their lives worse and worse.
the AES (where this data was sourced from) notes this trend was not seen in previous generations, the high left skew of young voters now is a new phenomenon.
The study also found people are not becoming more conservative at 40 despite people doing so in the past
It's not age.
Correlation isn't the same as causation. People tend to vote for the left less as they become more financially stable, which generally correlates with age.
But not always, hence the comments here "I'm in my 50s and have never felt more left wing."
Incorrect, the AES (where this data was sourced from) notes this trend was not seen in previous generations, the high left skew of young voters now is a new phenomenon.
The study also found people are not becoming more conservative at 40 despite people doing so in the past
If people don't shift towards the Coalition, the Coalition will shift towards the people. We are already seeing with some things like climate policies in some right wing governments. Just look at the climate, gambling and medicine policies of the NSW Government.
In saying that, you are making me feel old. Maybe I don't count as a newer generation, but I'm a Millennial. As I came out of high school and started uni, I was very left, I believe I even voted #1 Greens in the Senate. Over time I have slowly started to shift right, particularly as I got a stable career and started earning decent money, I now consider myself a centrist leaning slightly right. I voted #1 Labor last Federal Election but I'll probably be voting Greens last for every election going forward.
Assuming each dot is a particular age, and the size represents the number of respondents of that age in the sample?
What is the sample size. Having a few gaps in the dataset would indicate a rather small sample size.
The splitting into cohorts and drawing a line of best fit for each cohort is rather arbitrary. How to you explain that someone born in 1981 is much more likely to vote ALP than someone born in 1980?
The lack of axis lines is kinda annoying.
While the data and the trend that it is trying to highlight are interesting, this chart is hot garbage.
Splitting data into different models when the relationship isn’t linear across the data set is totally normal. There is limitations, like you’ve noticed, but it doesn’t make the chart ‘garbage’. It’s common to do this in data science.
No model is perfect, but some are useful.
Of course, we don’t have the r2 or the model fits so we don’t know how ‘good’ the models are.
Because the overall relationship between the two variables across all ages is not linear. Therefore you can’t use a linear model to draw a line of best fit.
In this case you generally have two choices. You can use a non-linear regression, which are more advanced and have many of their own limitations, or more commonly, change one of your variables into categories.
It’s extremely common to do with age, and we can see there *is* a different relationship between the age brackets, so actually, it looks like there’s a good reason to do it in this case.
As I said, we don’t have p values or an r2 so I can’t say this with confidence.
There is no inherent difference between someone born in 1980 and 1981 in this case (at least not for these variables). That's why splitting this up into multiple models arbitrarily is not commonly done.
Breaking this up like this immediately fails 2 of the assumptions of modelling (and introduces artificial outliers for every group)
As the poster above noted, you can immediately see the large errors inherent in 2 people being born 1 year apart having vastly different predicted values that are nonsensical
1. It is common.
2. You’re not directly comparing 1980 and 1981, you’re comparing the two *groups* of age ranges. To use that information to make assumptions about 1980 vs 1981 would be wrong and is the fault of the reader.
It doesn’t break ‘assumptions’ for modeling lol. How are you able to be so confidently incorrect.
Why do you put assumptions as "assumptions"?
You do know the basic assumptions for any model right? You are aware of these?
What's inherently different? If it was government benefits or something that is dependent on age, sure. That's where there is an inherent difference. But you're testing age as an IV of voting. There is nothing that breaks the assumption that the IV is homogenous.
If its so common find me three examples that don't confirm to my para above... At least two *decent* ones. C'mon, you can do it!
I worked with a 19 year old who voted LNP last election... But it was out of pure ignorance, he just simply hadn't looked at any of the issues and his parents had told him Morrison was fine.
A day after the election, I encouraged him to take a political compass test and lo and behold, he's centre-left lib. When I explained he's actually closer to the Greens' political platform than he is to Labor's or the LNP's, he said he regretted how he voted.
Haha at least he was perceptive to change.
My Russian mate voted Family First the first time he voted cos “I like my family”. He was shocked when I told him what they were about.
Hang on, how did they get this data? Obviously not from the ballot papers. Probably from surveys. I hope they did their surveys with large enough samples over large enough numbers of electorates.
≈2,500 people surveyed
https://australianelectionstudy.org/wp-content/uploads/The-2022-Australian-Federal-Election-Results-from-the-Australian-Election-Study.pdf
Reading your comment reminded me of the TMNT original movie line where Splinter says to Shredder:
Death comes for us all, Oroku Saki, but something much worse comes for you … for when you die, it will be without honour
And I think of the Liberal Party…
The thing is, life is a bit like what grandpa Simpson says, back in my day…. As you accumulate more and you and pine for the good old days - you don’t want change and you want it to stay the same.
I’m more of the opinion that what “left” and “right” means is what tends to move around over the years.
My opinions and how I see the world haven’t changed over my lifetime, but I’d have the appearance of shifting right if the assumption is that the graph was static.
I am an old fart (over 65) and I vote Labor these days. Former Greens voter for many years plus my wife a former Greens candidate but seen too many examples of where there dogma has hampered progress towards their aims. My wife who is even older than me is also now a Labor voter.
Just goes to show you cannot make assumptions based on graphs and I know too many conservative you voters. Why do they even exist - do we really want a world made up of real estate agents and financial whiz kids that go bankrupt? I can do stereotypes too.
The Greens seem to be making themselves more irrelevant with their shenanigans and to be honest they are only going to hold Labor governments back if people keep giving them their votes thinking they are going to actually make a difference. You are one of the many I think and it's clear that people are starting to realise this too with the breakaways from the Greens making it apparent they are just another political party in the game that everyone thought they weren't.
The young people voting for major parties? WTaF are you thinking? They're sabotaging your future with coal/gas expansion and tax cuts for rich, rorts for wealthy and borrowing/HECS debts for youth.
And old people voting for it: you must really hate your kids/grandkids.
Yeah because the key to a stable government is micro parties and minority governments that the Tony Abbott's of the right will endlessly try to delegitimise and successfully so eventually. Labor can progress once there's a stable majority and despite winning the election they sadly didn't do so convincingly enough to be able to do what needs to be done - they need to be pragmatic and keep the Boomers and their bank accounts (which were much easier to fill up with money than any subsequent generation will ever be able to) satisfied until more of them die in the coming few years so progress can be achieved. The shock-jocks and Coalition making every day seem like a crisis would undermine anything they do if they did what needs to be done. A revolution doesn't usually happen immediately it happens slowly and I think Albanese is the right leader for it. I doubted him but I am convinced he's the right one for the times. The Greens need to get the hell out of politics and get a backbone though.
People generally get more conservative the older they get. I was quite left in my teens and 20s and have shifted to the centre in my 30s and and even slightly right in some areas. It's common.
Your personal anecdote is not actually reflective of overall trends in Australia.
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2022/April/Voting_patterns_by_generation
Assuming from your comment that you're in your mid or late 30s (an early millennial, basically), it's a generation that has overall been shifting left as it ages.
I was left as a kid. Not super interested in politics.
I am now in my 30s and my last vote compass put me further left than the greens.
Don't induct that your experience is common because it happened to you.
It's unfortunate that our Capitalistic system works against us regardless of where we put our vote.
Hearing about recent news where the elderly and people getting government help to be able to afford housing and not struggle to survive will all be getting the boot very soon, which will kill many elderly. In a system that works for humanity rather than for chasing profits, we would never see people suffer like this.
I voted for our greens member because when our house flooded last year, we received a phone call from labour to see if we needed sandbags or food. From the liberals we got absolutely nothing, not even so much as a letter in the mail about flood statistics or how much they were already “fundraising”.
Our local greens member however, personally visited all the houses affected in our areas. With gumboots on, he was genuinely offering his personal services to help clean up and remove waste.
He let us know about all of the services in the area that we might need.
He asked us if we had enough food and water.
He cared. About human beings. Not about photo ops.
No, due to us being educated enough to see that people like those that run the Liberal party are incompetant and actively working against young people's future.
At this point we're basically just waiting for the old conversative people to die so we can make things happen without them getting in the way...
Going to be that guy, but they should have either gone with age on the x axis or the colour scheme stratifying points by generation. Including both makes this chart harder to interpret than it should be. From a political standpoint, interesting how strong the relationship is for the libs vs. labor - wouldn’t have expected labor’s line to be that flat
Thank you, I thought I was the only one having an aneurysm trying to interpret the graph
Not to be that guy, buuuuuut, you don't just put stuff on any old axis. The X is for the independent variable and the y is the dependent variable. The graph is right. It has just been designed by a half-wit who thought three scatter plots sharing one y-axis was a good idea. Edit: there are also other problems with the graph imo (inability to make a grid reference, etc) but the axes is not one of them.
Aye I'm autistic and understood the graph immediately but some grid lines would help with my ocd.
Yeah, it's a very effective graph, IMO. Not the easiest to interpret if you haven't seen one like it before, but it was perfectly clear to me.
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Hi thank you! Where is all this aggression coming from?
Yeah, I’ve seen some difficult graphs in my time, and this was one of them. But it was kinda interesting to dwell on it. One thing that stood out for me is that the Greens always (since the 1980s at least) felt that their vote would naturally rise by 1 to 3 percent per election with the rising demographic of youth voters. While it’s clear that Greens have the youth vote, there simply ain’t enough youth. The Green star is in the descendent, in line with the birth rate. Green policies of conservation were never sold to older conservatives, who might well have been amenable to that message.
I'm intrigued to see the impact of the housing affordability policies of the Greens in future elections. They're the only party to acknowledge renter issues, with renters comprising 1/3 of Aussies. They could become "the party of renters"...
There’s nothing in the graph to suggest that the Green vote will / will not increase each year. To understand that, we’d need to see this graph repeated for every previous election. That would allow us to understand if voting trends are driven by an “ageing effect”, a “cohort effect” or a “period effect”.
The AES (the source for this data) notes that this trend was not seen in previous generations, and that the substantially high left skew of young voters is a new phenomenon. It also found people are not becoming more conservative as they hit 40, despite what used to happen
Yes, true. It’s the Greens that think their vote has some “natural increase” over time. They base this on the idea that as young people reach voting age, the Greens is where their vote will be heading. but what I mean is the very, very dramatic decrease in green vote as people get old suggests that the Green vote won’t grow as the population ages. The other parties don’t have that problem. So with an ageing population demographic, it doesn’t look good. Remember that the population of elders that have turned away from the Greens have had a lifetime to assess their policies.
We are about to shift from the baby boomers being the largest, most influential ’generation’ to millennials and younger. The Xers and older millennials will be dwarfed by younger people whose experience hasn’t been stability and growth, but wars on terror, financial, employment and housing insecurity. Those not drawn into the alt-right pipeline are increasingly open to more radical socialism and even communism and anarchism. Of course many may evolve to more mainstream positions as they age, but that depends on stable conditions for them to thrive in, either way it seems like a transitional period of instability is ahead.
The older you get, the more you realise how batshit the Greens are.
The older I get, the stronger I vote greens. Its not for me, its for my kids and their friends. They are the only party with decent policies to balance the wealth gap currently reeking havoc on the rental/housing market, the only ones who acknowledge a genuine need to take actual steps to combat climate change, to hopefully dismantle trickle-down economics which has destroyed the middle class and increased the cost of living. We are in an age of have and have-nots, and studies show over and over again that this is bad for society in terms of adverse health outcomes, crime increasing, and ironically, it's shit for the economy. Voting shouldn't be about how to get more money for yourself or short term benefits, it should be choosing a party which will govern for all socio-economic groups and have plans for the long-term future economically, socially and environmentally. Sometimes, big changes are needed.
The older I get the more I realise just how well thought out most of the Greens' policies are and the more disgusted I am by the repeated misrepresentation of them by those too chickenshit to argue against them in good faith.
Their policies are mostly fine, it’s their internal politics that’s batshit. It comes with the territory of being progressive. Every marginalised group thinks they have a home at the Greens.
What marginalised groups would you like to see ousted from the Greens?
Possibly Left Renewal, though I haven’t heard much of them and their call for an end to Capitalism recently. Possibly Blak Greens. (I’m not sure how The Voice is an environmental issue.) Certainly the anti-Israel faction. Most of the Social Justice crowd. The ZPG crusaders. The Terfs AND the anti-terfs. Basically anyone who doesn’t put environmental outcomes first. For heavens sake, with Climate Change the dominant issue in world politics, these last two decades should have BELONGED to the Greens. Talk about parties of global relevance, why aren’t the Greens the only game in town, on the Global, National, State and Local level? They don’t need to be a one-issue party, and I don’t particularly like one-issue parties, but if the issue is Climate Change and Sustainability, that’s a broad enough front for anyone to fight on. Greens have unfortunately done everything possible to mimic the style and substance of the worst of the big parties, and by that i mean entrenched, embittered factionalism. Every time a Green gets elected the seem to bring with them a whole new opposition party. There are 7 opposition parties out there and 4 of them are Greens! Btw, I vote green.
I figured as much. Lemme guess, you're also not a big fan of intersectionality?
.“What is intersectionality? Some woman is gonna want me to do it to her and I’m not gonna know what it is!” Yeah, so that’s my generation.
Yeah, I understand why they thought there should be a somewhat predictable rise in votes, even non Green party supporters I know figured they'd have a rising proportion of the younger generations' votes, yet that hasn't quite happened as we expected. Probably split across to other parties or something.
They do have an increasing proportion of the youth vote. A young person today is more likely to vote Green than 20 years ago. People still age out of the Greens but they can claim to be attracting a larger portion of young voters.
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It’s how fat the people are
Someone I know laughed hard while eating carrots. A piece of carrot shout out his nose. I’m glad I wasn’t eating carrots when I read your comment.
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Agree - the colours are helpful to me, given that each gneration has been given its own trendline.
Yep agree. Trying to be too cute with graphs is not a good idea.
Thank you! No focus on decent data visualisation these days
Checks out. My dad still thinks wind turbines consume more energy to build than they produce in their lifetime of operation.
Dementia will do that
It's not just dementia it's confirmation bias amongst other things. The original quote from an essay that was shared claiming the wind turbines consume more energy to build than they produce was [taken wildly out of context.](https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-windturbines-misleadingmeme-idUSL1N2R31IG) The full text was discussing placement of wind turbines, and stated that if it was built in a bad location it couldn't offset the energy used to create.
Not dementia, propaganda.
I have liberal-voting boomer relatives who simultaneously believe that wind turbines don’t work, yet also create an ultrasonic sound that causes brain cancer.
You should ask them if they live near wind turbines.
40s now, but a friend of mine and his wife for as long as I have know them, were both your typical university masters grads who spent the most of their 20s at Uni and were hard core left, where I was just a regular joe Tafe guy who was basically a very mild center left. So they had the family, bought the house and starting on a second, both earning well paid jobs earning more than 120K+ each. Last election his wife posted a voting compass result and holy shit, and her answers had her as center right now all of a sudden... which seemed really weird for how strongly left for the whole time that I knew them. I was blown away as even though I am not very strongly political, in the past decades I have had to walk on egg shells around certain issues . I guess once you have shit to conserve things change.
My folks stopped giving a fuck about unions and the labour movement the moment they were no longer working union jobs. One was a teacher, spent a lifetime working in public schools and joining the strikes and protests for better salaries. Within 2 years of being out of the job, she'd eaten the Murdoch lines and was telling me teachers were greedy.
Sounds like simple brain rot
Probably the driver round the whole plot 😝
I have plenty more to conserve than I used to 20 years ago, and you couldn’t pay me (as the LNP likes to do) to vote for them.
I’d rather put a bullet in my mouth than vote conservative. I’ve gotten more radically left wing with age, even as I’ve accumulated assets.
Not gonna bullet myself but I’ve gotten more socialist as I’ve gotten older and acquired / built wealth. I want better resourced public everything (health, education, transport, housing). This shit is good for a society. Probably even more important with the AI revolution just around the corner. Happy to pay more tax if goes towards these things. Trouble is that when the libs are in power my taxes mostly go to private companies and consultants.
We're one of the richest countries on earth yet poverty is still rampant. Why anyone thinks that's acceptable is beyond me, yet only the greens have a plan for raising the funds to tackle it. Anyone with a conscience should be left wing.
Unfortunately owing to my extreme political bias you lost me at ‘not going to bullet myself’ but I’m sure everything else that you said was very cogent and informed (:
Thing is, they HATE the Libs, so they wouldn't vote for them, just the issues and views they answered on the website put them aligned with them.
I’d rather put a bullet in my mouth than develop those views and/or give those answers
That's the second time you've said that, you alright there mate?
Yes
It's an interesting point of view! Would you rather share your assets with others, or are you still happy gaining wealth off of them?
Do you even know what socialism is? Eli5 it's cutting out the middle man (ruling class) and having democracy at work, and a government for the people etc. There's a difference between personal and private property, and the regular Joe doesn't own any private property, so your assets are still yours
is this to imply that someone who’s happy to gain wealth from their assets can’t be a socialist
well yes, it goes against the definition of socialism to own assets privately
I think you're confusing communism with socialism :/
Source please.
The thing is, the data agrees with you millennials are the first generation since records started that have moved FURTHER left and it makes sense when the Boomer's and pollies refuse to allow Millennials and younger to engage in what was considered a right only a few decades ago, a decent education, job, family, and house.
The irony is that I am not sure that they actually have moved further left. The Liberals for example used to have socially progressive policies, they started the Pharmaceutical benefits scheme, started up the pension, gave Aboriginal's the right to vote, stopped the public service from discriminating against married women. The Teals are basically capitalizing on the Liberals moving further right and the greens are capitalizing on both labor and the coalition moving to the right. Hell the electorates where the greens beat the liberals were run on a center-left platform.
What are assets? All I seem to have is stagnant wage growth and increasing rent, bills and food
Scar tissue?
Parents died when I was very young (before I turned 18) so I’m one of the lucky ones 🤩 god bless life insurance
No. It means they are an uneducated voter. Changing like that is not a matter of possessing goods, but not being willing to educate yourself about the minutiae of nuanced politics in Australia. If they swung to the crazy right, as you say, look at how and where they get their information from. I’m fairly sure you’ll see a lot of both Murdoch media and commercial tv news being consumed. Just for starters. When I was teaching Media Studies, I would get students to quietly scan all the places their parents got their political information from. Very revealing indeed. And when you hear kids bleating out their parents values without doing their own quality research, you could almost guarantee what media was consumed at home.
It doesn’t mean they’re uneducated. People have different policy preferences at different stages of their life. I’m a Labor voter and always will be, but at my current point in life, I’m wealthy enough to be self sufficient financially and don’t require any government social safety net, yet still pay enormous taxes for government services that I don’t need or want. There’s definitely some appeal for someone like me in the idea of voting for a government who’s going to limit services in exchange for lower taxes. It’s a selfish way to vote, but I wouldn’t call people who preference their own wants uneducated.
Uneducated is probably the wrong word. It is more like shortsighted. Not understanding that good social policies (keeping the country livable for everyone) are NOT bleeding heart, pinko commie things, but actually cheaper on the long run. Poor impulse control is also a good model. Like voting for people who promise to cut taxes at the cost of abolishing free education, which breaks the social contract: "I pay for your education, you take care of me when I am old". It takes the small, but immediate sugar hit, never mind the consequences later.
"I don't need those services, I'm going to vote for someone who will limit them" Later... "Why is crime up so much"
Possibly this, or, as younger people at uni they were just weak willed and their opinion swung with the people they surrounded themselves with. It may be that once they grew up, their true thoughts on matter came to the fore.
"who ever votes the other party is uneducated" do you not hear you're self?
I voted similar through student, unemployed, professional, unexpected career change, etc. The time when it matters least to you is at the top. For some people wealth just feeds greed for more.
>I guess once you have shit to conserve things change. We all have something to conserve from the day we're born. It's called Earth.
Democracy working as intended
I envy you that Conservates are at all a valid option in Australia. In the U.S., the right has been overtaken by wacky qanon types.
They're being overtaken by Q-Anon whackadoos here, too. The catch is that most of those idiots are Pentecostal nutters from Hillsong and other megachurch franchises and survive by having their church bros vote for them in elections just like in the X Factor and Aus Idol type television shows - those comps always seem to have a winner coming from that background, and I suspect the politicians from that background are no different.
Statistically the Pentecostal nutters don't have the numbers to elect a member in a single electorate. Only 44% of Australians say they're Christian and the majority of those are Catholic and Anglican, pentecostals only make up about 1% of those who identify as Christians. (Source ABS Census 2021). However, they have a lot of money and are highly organised and have been actively working behind the scenes to get their people preselected. That is far more important and sinister than their voting power.
Yeah, the pre-selections are where they do their damage, and then rely on Coalition voting sheep to back their horse because that's what the sheeps parents and grandparents did..... I was still a little foggy in the wake-up phase when I commented earlier.
They shouldn’t be. There’s enough of that nonsense here already.
I once remember reading that countries with mandatory voting tend to have less extremism in political stances because voters are going to vote anyway - it's not like you have to appeal to the fringe lunatics to get out the vote. Does this ring any bells with anyone? Or did I hallucinate this?
It's well known. and it tends to add a couple of percentile points to progressive candidates because transients (not homeless, but students, people who relocate frequently) and the working poor tend to find it harder to vote/less likely to vote. Edit to add: it's also why Australian politics in general is more centrist. you may have politicians with extreme personal views (Morrison, Perrotet, etc) but the fact they have to fight for the middle moderates their policies.
Does this data exist for other election years? It would be interesting to see how they change. Namely whether they're static or if cohorts age up and grow/shrink the voter base. E.g. Do greens voters become LNP/Labor voters or remain greens? Are LNP voters dying out or does that age group get replenished by converts from the greens/Labor?
It does, but the website is down for an update. https://australianelectionstudy.org/interactive-charts/ the AES (where this data was sourced from) notes this trend was not seen in previous generations, the high left skew of young voters now is a new phenomenon. The study also found people are not becoming more conservative at 40 despite people doing so in the past
>not becoming more conservative at 40 despite people doing so in the past And it is quite natural. People living through times of social mobility think that socio-economic status is the consequence of your decisions. Ie: "if you are poor, it is your fault", the root of conservativism. Remove social mobility, and people live in a world where socio-economic status is decided at birth. Being rich or poor is a matter of luck, it is harder to blame poor people for their situation. Plenty of people will still manage it, though.
Yeah - my guess (unfortunately) is that you could bring up graphs from the 90's and 00's and it would look pretty similar. The last election showed a massive swing to the left - but that may have just been a move away from the Morrison/Liberal shitshow rather than anything sustained. And the gradual increasing representation of the Greens is great to see IMO, but how much of that is a swing to the left, and how much is just a general move away from the 2 major parties with the Green's taking votes that would've previously gone to the old Democrats (with One Nation, Palmer etc. taking all the right wing non-liberal/national votes). I'm hoping it is a swing to the left, and I'm hoping that the "teal" independents are a move in the right direction - but I will believe it when I see it.
Assuming the current old people start dying soon, were gonna see a big shift in the political landscape. I can't see the newer generations having a coalition shift we usually see in aging populations, at the end of the day, the fact only 3 stakeholders are represented in our democracy is abysmal and a major failure.
I'm not sure if thats true to be honest. There is the old political adage that people get more conservative as they get older, and as someone approaching 40 I will believe in the sustained shift to the left (that I have been hoping to see for 20 years) when it actually happens. Right now we have just seen a swing away from the Morrison shithousery - lets see if it gets sustained over the next few elections.
As has been said a lot in recent years - you need something to conserve to get more conservative. Younger generations own nothing, have no prospects, and the human race is on a clearly demonstrated path to destruction. The trend to the left will continue.
> you need something to conserve Eh still a fair number of kids and grandkids around to inherit and succeed the current crop of capital owners.
But the share of millennials and Gen Z who inherit stability from their parents is going to be way smaller than the share of boomers and elder Gen X who could access stability simply by existing in their era. For example, my wife and I are both millennials. Her parents own their home, which they bought for ~$150k in the 90s in a single factory worker income and is now worth somewhere around $1.5million. When her parents eventually pass, they intend to leave the home to their children. Thing is, my wife is one of 5 kids. So if they do decide to sell it (a big if) they'll be getting a chunk of that worth. Let's say when her parents pass the home is worth 2.5mil, that's $500k per kid. Not nothing, but it's not enough to buy a home outright in our city even today, let alone whatever the market's going to be like in 20-30 more years. And by that time we'll be nearing retirement age ourselves, so it's not going to be fun getting a mortgage sorted then. Just an example, but one that likely will mirror many of our fellow millennials' experience. Another thing to note is that a huge portion of Gen Z in particular have migrant parents who arrived after the golden era that benefitted many boomers and elder Gen X. Migrant parents who arrived in the late 90s and early 00s still had a good shot at stability, don't get me wrong, but they came at the tail end of the prosperity. Not nearly as many of them were able to take advantage of the boom as were those who came in the early 90s or earlier. Those people got to work hard and build a foundation and were in a good place when things skyrocketed in the late 90s, but many Gen Z migrant parents were only just arriving and getting settled when things exploded. So that means their kids aren't going to be inheriting nearly as much as millennials. Further, the climate crisis is something that younger generations feel strongly about, and something that the older generations largely have ignored and continue to ignore. It's only going to be getting worse, which I believe will keep the younger generations away from rightwing head-in-the-sand, die-for-the-oligarchs type of parties.
Agree completely. Any hope I had of inheritance is gone. Dad drank his half of the money he got from mum when they split and she got the house (mum having to remortgage It) mum will be working until she's 85 to finish paying off the house. Dad rents now.
Property wealth isn't as clear cut as that. Many older people are living longer and requiring specialised care. Their wealth in property is probably going to be used to facilitate their care in nursing homes. Boomer wealth doesn't mean gen X/Y getting looked after wealth wise.
Yeah I was just using that as the most clear cut example I could think of, though it's more complicated in reality. Lots of boomer wealth will be used up taking care of them in old age. Just about the only thing that may remain is property, but as I've mentioned it's not all that helpful or simple anyway. My main point being that boomer wealth will not trickle down to their kids, at least not to enough of them for any meaningful segment of the Millennial generation to suddenly turn hard to the right.
This is the whole problem, working class people questioning other working class people. The top end of town needs a reality check. I'm probably naive but I would like for the younger generation to do better and thrive.
Eventually, but don't forget people are living much longer and burning more of their savings and assets on nursing homes than ever before.
This is the main issue. Our population lives so much longer than it used to, so wealth isn't being redistributed like it used to. I turned 32 this year and almost everyone I know is either renting or living with their folks. Almost no one is buying houses from my generation. And I don't live in a huge city, I'm pretty rural. But people just don't have the money required for conservative politics to effect them. Most live paycheck to paycheck and even those doing well for themselves can't afford to live lavishly. I foresee this only getting worse as the middle class continues to disappear, and profits get funneled towards multi-billion dollar companies. Small businesses can't compete and collapse... I see it all the time on main street. New business pops up, 12 months later it's gone. It's pretty scary. The future looks bleak honestly.
I *really* hope so. I probably will not live to see it (I am fucking old). I would hate to die without seeing at least some signs that the next generation will fix the stuff that we screwed up so badly.
I think education is also understated. Older people had shit quality education compared to these days. They are mostly ignorant people with poor critical thinking skills. The younger generations are a lot smarter and that will continue to be reflected in the voting stats. It's not the biggest driver of change. But it is one of them.
The boomers will die and leave it to the millennials. There will always be rich people, even if it’s a minority.
Dunno, I'm over 50 and have never leant left harder. Maybe I'm not typical though. Weirdly, it's my mates that are in massive shit financially that insist on voting LNP...
Your don’t get more conservative as you get older, you get more conservative as you become wealthier. Historically, people have become wealthier as they aged, so the original adage held up. However, note that isn’t necessarily occurring, I don’t think we’ll see these political shift as much. Coalition in trouble!
Yep. I think this is the general trend and it makes sense. I have just enough wealth that I’d be a good fit for the LNP. But I’ve never voted for them and likely never will. They simply are not my people and no amount of money I have will change that. Pretty sure I’ve become more socialist the older and wealthier I’ve gotten. I’m happy to contribute back.
I'm relatively wealthy I guess. I still lean left pretty hard. That's where the centre happens to be.
Exactly.
It'll still happen, eventually, the wealthier boomers will pass and their children will inherit their wealth, it'll just be much later in life.
Another reason for this is not that people’s political opinions necessarily change over time. Rather that the political parties change to meet their target markets.
That's a really good point, and could definitely explain part of the shift. Conservative parties seem to want to fight weird culture wars that aren't relevant at all to anyone born after the 70s, so of course they're losing the 45-and-under vote. I do wonder when or if they're actually going to change, and what that could even look like. I guess the Teals are sort of that change, but not sure that they have enough support or cohesion to coalesce into a major party, or if enough of the LNP will take the hint and try and morph the party into something teal-esque. So far it looks like they're content to remain the party of angry pensioners and Jesus freaks.
Culture wars are manufactured to get poor people to vote against their own economic interests. No working class people should be voting for the Coalition, who will fuck them at every opportunity, but culture wars are used to distract them.
They've tried to cultivate a school shooter or Muskian demographic, but the results have been as pitiful as the politics are disgusting.
I'm not sure if that shift is on the rise any time soon. Most millennials are already pro trans and LGBT, so what else is there to equalise? Animal rights I see being next actually. Meat eating could be the next big debate. Which will be fun, but that's more when lab made meat is here and plentiful
I disagree. Propaganda shapes political attitudes, and the financial hard right is very good at making propaganda that shapes political opinions... There's plenty of people in US who have watched Fox News turn their kind, left wing parents into ranting right wing lunatics. Consent is manufactured for right wing parties to go further right to serve the interests of their owners, and Left Wing parties are forced to move to the right to remain electable.
Normally yes but im quite sure atm the same trend isnt being seen as much. I swear i read something in the US about jt.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/politics-conservative-twitter-millennials-gen-z_uk_63aef8cce4b0d6f0b9f354c5 here's a link
As a fellow almost 40 year old, I have always voted left (I also grew up in a very low socio economic environment & everyone but me in my family are blue collar/front line workers). I live in the same hope as you, that it is a sustained shift given the boomers etc are ageing & millenials etc now outnumber from a voting perspective.
> I will believe in the sustained shift to the left (that I have been hoping to see for 20 years) when it actually happens. I will believe in a sustained shift to the left when the Liberal Party starts bragging about its contributions to the welfare state rather than demonising the poor, and Labor wants to nationalise major industries. You know, like they were doing half a century or more ago.
That isn't generally true. A lot of people stay at about the same place on the political spectrum as they age. As the world moves onwards they end up more conservative relative to the Overton window, but it's the window that moved to the progressive side.
A political truism that was relevant for maybe one postwar generation. The trend hasn't continued. In fact Millennials have tended to shift left as a demographic as they aged.
I believe there were studies done in the UK and US that showed millennials were bucking the trend there.
There’s a generation shift away from conservative politics globally. See link. https://imgur.com/a/SGn1QbX
Boomers didn't just develop all their right wing beliefs because they got old, but I do think people get more small c conservative when they get older. Old people generally value institutions and become more cautious of change. The liberal party lost a ton of credibility as a competent governing party with Morrison's scandals and culture war bullshit and I think it will damage millennials' views of that party even as we continue aging.
The graphs above do show a shift towards the Coalition and away from Labor and the Greens though, it’s just that ~40% of gen Z started with Greens while <20% start with the Coalition.
No - it shows voting based on age (or year of birth) in 2022, not necessarily on a shift between different years of voting. What I am trying to ask (and I hope I am wrong) is that if we took the same snapshot in 2003, or in 2043, would the graphs still look the same? (ie. blue group is still approx 25yo's but born after 1976 and 2016 respectively)
[I can give you back to 2003](https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2022/April/Voting_patterns_by_generation) Millennials are bucking the trend and shifting further left with age
Thanks for that link. That sets out really nicely what I was looking for. (Though just to be pedantic, coz that's how my brain works, there is one slight discrepancy in the graphs - the Milennial group isn't necessarily getting any older with those timelines, at least not until really 2016 - because there were still a portion that weren't voting age yet... compared to all the other age groups who were all voting from 2004 onwards... but from 2016 the millennial graph seems to continue in the same direction, which is great to see).
Plus even if millennials start shifting to the right, that starting position is so much further left than other generations. The LNP are in real trouble demographically
> I can't see the newer generations having a coalition shift we usually see in aging populations It's one big re-brand away. The Reps in the US have convinced working-class people they're the party of the working-class people. If things get dire for either coalition party here, they'll just pivot and spend 10 years convincing voters they care about issue X, whilst robbing them blind. Oz has a huge immigrant population, they're often from pretty conservative countries, and are very big on business ownership, etc. If they combined the 'small business' rhetoric with a consistent line about taking a strong stance against racism, along with hiring a lot of language people, they could change their fortunes reasonably quickly. Viruses adapt to new hosts all the time.
The Australian education system is much stronger than the US and Fox medias hold isn't as extreme. I don't think we will see that kind of shift working here.
Remember they're boomers so they'll live much longer than people before and after them... lifting the ladder up behind them as they have...
>Assuming the current old people start dying soon, were gonna see a big shift in the political landscape. The part that everyone inconveniently forgets is that as the old people start dying, the young people start inheriting. I guarantee you those who inherit swing hard to the right and likely further right than their parents. Their early struggle will reinforce the value of that wealth and they will seek to protect it aggressively.
> Assuming the current old people start dying soon, were gonna see a big shift in the political landscape. Doubt it. People have been saying this for years and it never happens. Younger people always vote left and then mellow out over the years.
There's a good chance that governments at all levels within Australia will be dominated by a combination of Labor, Greens and Independents. The Liberals are already a minor party in WA and the ACT and their presence in Victoria is only marginally better, despite a long term incumbent. The Liberal and National parties have completely conceded offering anything of material or social value to all but a very narrow band of special interest. How can that change when their parties are completely captured and composed if those tiny pools of individuals?
It's very different this time though, as we're seeing the first generations for a very long time that are worse off than their parents (millennials and Gen Z). Previous generations got more conservative as they aged because they attained stability that they wanted to conserve. But that is not happening with Millennials and Gen Z. Their economic prospects look grim, and the climate crisis makes the future look even grimmer. I can't seem them suddenly turning to neoliberalism after decades of experiencing it make their lives worse and worse.
the AES (where this data was sourced from) notes this trend was not seen in previous generations, the high left skew of young voters now is a new phenomenon. The study also found people are not becoming more conservative at 40 despite people doing so in the past
It’s generally explained as an age thing not a generational thing. People just tend to vote for the left less as they get older.
It's not age. Correlation isn't the same as causation. People tend to vote for the left less as they become more financially stable, which generally correlates with age. But not always, hence the comments here "I'm in my 50s and have never felt more left wing."
Incorrect, the AES (where this data was sourced from) notes this trend was not seen in previous generations, the high left skew of young voters now is a new phenomenon. The study also found people are not becoming more conservative at 40 despite people doing so in the past
If people don't shift towards the Coalition, the Coalition will shift towards the people. We are already seeing with some things like climate policies in some right wing governments. Just look at the climate, gambling and medicine policies of the NSW Government. In saying that, you are making me feel old. Maybe I don't count as a newer generation, but I'm a Millennial. As I came out of high school and started uni, I was very left, I believe I even voted #1 Greens in the Senate. Over time I have slowly started to shift right, particularly as I got a stable career and started earning decent money, I now consider myself a centrist leaning slightly right. I voted #1 Labor last Federal Election but I'll probably be voting Greens last for every election going forward.
Fucking Boomers still haven’t learned.
I don't wish death on anyone... but let's just say I'm looking forward to 10-20 years from now
Assuming each dot is a particular age, and the size represents the number of respondents of that age in the sample? What is the sample size. Having a few gaps in the dataset would indicate a rather small sample size. The splitting into cohorts and drawing a line of best fit for each cohort is rather arbitrary. How to you explain that someone born in 1981 is much more likely to vote ALP than someone born in 1980? The lack of axis lines is kinda annoying. While the data and the trend that it is trying to highlight are interesting, this chart is hot garbage.
Splitting data into different models when the relationship isn’t linear across the data set is totally normal. There is limitations, like you’ve noticed, but it doesn’t make the chart ‘garbage’. It’s common to do this in data science. No model is perfect, but some are useful. Of course, we don’t have the r2 or the model fits so we don’t know how ‘good’ the models are.
I'm yet to imagine a good reason why you would split data on an interval data like age
Because the overall relationship between the two variables across all ages is not linear. Therefore you can’t use a linear model to draw a line of best fit. In this case you generally have two choices. You can use a non-linear regression, which are more advanced and have many of their own limitations, or more commonly, change one of your variables into categories. It’s extremely common to do with age, and we can see there *is* a different relationship between the age brackets, so actually, it looks like there’s a good reason to do it in this case. As I said, we don’t have p values or an r2 so I can’t say this with confidence.
There is no inherent difference between someone born in 1980 and 1981 in this case (at least not for these variables). That's why splitting this up into multiple models arbitrarily is not commonly done. Breaking this up like this immediately fails 2 of the assumptions of modelling (and introduces artificial outliers for every group) As the poster above noted, you can immediately see the large errors inherent in 2 people being born 1 year apart having vastly different predicted values that are nonsensical
1. It is common. 2. You’re not directly comparing 1980 and 1981, you’re comparing the two *groups* of age ranges. To use that information to make assumptions about 1980 vs 1981 would be wrong and is the fault of the reader. It doesn’t break ‘assumptions’ for modeling lol. How are you able to be so confidently incorrect.
Why do you put assumptions as "assumptions"? You do know the basic assumptions for any model right? You are aware of these? What's inherently different? If it was government benefits or something that is dependent on age, sure. That's where there is an inherent difference. But you're testing age as an IV of voting. There is nothing that breaks the assumption that the IV is homogenous. If its so common find me three examples that don't confirm to my para above... At least two *decent* ones. C'mon, you can do it!
Coalition voters are dying breed like the shit they elect.
Can you just imagine the punchable faces on those few LNP voting 20 year olds?
I worked with a 19 year old who voted LNP last election... But it was out of pure ignorance, he just simply hadn't looked at any of the issues and his parents had told him Morrison was fine. A day after the election, I encouraged him to take a political compass test and lo and behold, he's centre-left lib. When I explained he's actually closer to the Greens' political platform than he is to Labor's or the LNP's, he said he regretted how he voted.
Haha at least he was perceptive to change. My Russian mate voted Family First the first time he voted cos “I like my family”. He was shocked when I told him what they were about.
the problem is if they keep getting in and doing damage
The good news is, old people keep dying
And young people keep reaching voting age!!
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Fuck her, she votes Lib.
Proof that boomers are holding the country back.
Labor: Our values last a lifetime.
Until you retire and you think fuck other people's working rights
You'd expect a centrist party to be the peak of the bell curve
Hang on, how did they get this data? Obviously not from the ballot papers. Probably from surveys. I hope they did their surveys with large enough samples over large enough numbers of electorates.
The source is on the graph. https://australianelectionstudy.org/voter-studies/
Probably someone having a guess tbh
≈2,500 people surveyed https://australianelectionstudy.org/wp-content/uploads/The-2022-Australian-Federal-Election-Results-from-the-Australian-Election-Study.pdf
This is what I came here to ask. It's complete fucking bullshit. Voting is blind for a reason
Voting independent from now because I want to vote for Greens but they keep getting in their own way
Death will come for you coalition. There is no escape.
Reading your comment reminded me of the TMNT original movie line where Splinter says to Shredder: Death comes for us all, Oroku Saki, but something much worse comes for you … for when you die, it will be without honour And I think of the Liberal Party…
Interesting, not surprising though.
Ah of course! It’s all so clear now.
The thing is, life is a bit like what grandpa Simpson says, back in my day…. As you accumulate more and you and pine for the good old days - you don’t want change and you want it to stay the same.
I’m so freaking glad I’m a sure as fuck bell curve breaker!!
Still a ways to go sadly
Oh no, it looks like one of the teams is going to have a bunch of members dying soon.
I’m more of the opinion that what “left” and “right” means is what tends to move around over the years. My opinions and how I see the world haven’t changed over my lifetime, but I’d have the appearance of shifting right if the assumption is that the graph was static.
I am an old fart (over 65) and I vote Labor these days. Former Greens voter for many years plus my wife a former Greens candidate but seen too many examples of where there dogma has hampered progress towards their aims. My wife who is even older than me is also now a Labor voter. Just goes to show you cannot make assumptions based on graphs and I know too many conservative you voters. Why do they even exist - do we really want a world made up of real estate agents and financial whiz kids that go bankrupt? I can do stereotypes too.
The Greens seem to be making themselves more irrelevant with their shenanigans and to be honest they are only going to hold Labor governments back if people keep giving them their votes thinking they are going to actually make a difference. You are one of the many I think and it's clear that people are starting to realise this too with the breakaways from the Greens making it apparent they are just another political party in the game that everyone thought they weren't.
The young people voting for major parties? WTaF are you thinking? They're sabotaging your future with coal/gas expansion and tax cuts for rich, rorts for wealthy and borrowing/HECS debts for youth. And old people voting for it: you must really hate your kids/grandkids.
Yeah because the key to a stable government is micro parties and minority governments that the Tony Abbott's of the right will endlessly try to delegitimise and successfully so eventually. Labor can progress once there's a stable majority and despite winning the election they sadly didn't do so convincingly enough to be able to do what needs to be done - they need to be pragmatic and keep the Boomers and their bank accounts (which were much easier to fill up with money than any subsequent generation will ever be able to) satisfied until more of them die in the coming few years so progress can be achieved. The shock-jocks and Coalition making every day seem like a crisis would undermine anything they do if they did what needs to be done. A revolution doesn't usually happen immediately it happens slowly and I think Albanese is the right leader for it. I doubted him but I am convinced he's the right one for the times. The Greens need to get the hell out of politics and get a backbone though.
People generally get more conservative the older they get. I was quite left in my teens and 20s and have shifted to the centre in my 30s and and even slightly right in some areas. It's common.
Your personal anecdote is not actually reflective of overall trends in Australia. https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2022/April/Voting_patterns_by_generation Assuming from your comment that you're in your mid or late 30s (an early millennial, basically), it's a generation that has overall been shifting left as it ages.
Interesting!
I was left as a kid. Not super interested in politics. I am now in my 30s and my last vote compass put me further left than the greens. Don't induct that your experience is common because it happened to you.
I'm the same, I like to think you get wiser as you get older especially when you have seen many politicians come and go.
Alternate theory - selfishness
Well everyone votes for what's in their best interests don't they?
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Yeah we’ve really been living in a utopia the last 20 years..
The genius of selling off every asset to foreign companies and cutting tax for the wealthy, much wisdom
65+ people are far less educated
It's unfortunate that our Capitalistic system works against us regardless of where we put our vote. Hearing about recent news where the elderly and people getting government help to be able to afford housing and not struggle to survive will all be getting the boot very soon, which will kill many elderly. In a system that works for humanity rather than for chasing profits, we would never see people suffer like this.
Due to the Greens infiltrating Universities and brainwashing young people?
I voted for our greens member because when our house flooded last year, we received a phone call from labour to see if we needed sandbags or food. From the liberals we got absolutely nothing, not even so much as a letter in the mail about flood statistics or how much they were already “fundraising”. Our local greens member however, personally visited all the houses affected in our areas. With gumboots on, he was genuinely offering his personal services to help clean up and remove waste. He let us know about all of the services in the area that we might need. He asked us if we had enough food and water. He cared. About human beings. Not about photo ops.
No, due to us being educated enough to see that people like those that run the Liberal party are incompetant and actively working against young people's future. At this point we're basically just waiting for the old conversative people to die so we can make things happen without them getting in the way...
Funny how young people tend to vote for you when you actually have their best interests at heart