[csaa-forum] polling booth participant observation 101

[charlotte]

hi all

as one of (i presume) the younger members of this mailing list, i feel 
compelled to de-lurk by this kind of lazy youth-bashing. here's a "true 
yoof" perspective (otherwise entitled, "who or what is meatloaf?" *):

my experience, both as a young person and working in tertiary education 
with other young people has not been that we as a generation are 
'bored' with politics. many of the young people who i have encountered 
have grown up in a world that encouraged them to be environmentally 
conscious, interested in engaging with people from different cultures, 
and deeply concerned with injustices both locally and internationally.

when you have an election fought over interest rates, of course you are 
going to get 'bored looking' young people. politicians tend to be 
over-30 if not over-40, seem to assume, like phil and sue below, that 
young people really can't be bothered with politics, and decide not to 
bother with them. add to that political systems where the two major 
parties, in the space of my adult life, have demonstrated little 
difference (thankfully mmp in new zealand has made the minor parties 
more viable and visible), and where most of those who get elected are 
well over 30 (think of it: middle-aged people are voting for their 
peers, young people are voting for their parents?? no wonder they're 
not excited!), and there's little wonder that young people are 
disinterested in the voting process (scary but true to think that i 
have more in common with the australian idol contestants than i do with 
the members of the senate!). hopefully, again, having mmp allow people 
like nandor [new zealand's dread-locked, skate-boarding rastafarian 
green mp, for the aussies] into parliament is giving young people the 
sense that politicans are people we can relate to.

the issue that i have found working with youth is not that we are 
politically apathetic, but rather that we find it difficult to see how 
to effectively act on our political aspirations and ideals. add to that 
the fact that politically oriented young people, in my experience, live 
in a world that's much bigger than their (parent's) backyard -- it's 
hard trying to fight bush, howard, nike, starbucks, pollution, 
deforestation, patriarchy, and have time left to, well, just be young. 
young people who try be politically engaged are working with a sense 
that local, national and international affairs are intimately 
interwoven (hence national elections might not necessarily be the most 
important part of these processes), and a lack of clear effective 
strategies (protest matches are, like, so twentieth century -- actually 
some of the recent big demonstrations have made me warm to them a bit, 
but you get the idea).

i think, too, that having not been around on this earth for very long 
gives me and my contemporaries a different sense of what the world is 
like. i mean by this that there are some underlying assumptions that 
structure my world not because i'm bored, or even through any conscious 
or unconscious choice of my own, but simply because the world has 
always been that way. i'm glad to have grown up in an aotearoa / new 
zealand where treaty principles were written into everything, and the 
nation defined itself as bicultural (whatever that might mean), and i'm 
scared of the way that's changing. on the other hand, being a 
rogernomics baby for whom student loans and unemployment are simply 
realities makes it difficult to imagine that the world might be 
otherwise. it's only in the past couple of years that i've been able to 
realise how this has affected my attitudes towards work and study. i 
wouldn't want to overglamorise the 70s apprenticeship schemes etc, but 
i think that it's very difficult for young people, not to imagine the 
world being different, but to imagine change as a concrete reality. 
which makes it, again, difficult for us to see how voting for one 
grey-haired politico rather than the other will change anything.

i don't think any of this adds up to an excuse for not voting or for 
voting -- i'm as appalled as any 40-something leftie by those who don't 
exercise their democratic right/privilege -- but i think that we need 
to remember that for every parachute-attending [christian rock 
festival] christian fundamentalist youth or liberal-voting neocon uni 
student, there is a tree-hugging, sweatshop-free, pro-queer marriage 
young person who's having a difficult time making sense of a difficult 
world.

okay, i think that's my rant!
best
charlotte

* okay, i do feel compelled to confess that i do know both answers to 
this one. but only because i'm into, you know, retro.

On 12/10/2004, at 4:37 PM, Philip Bagust wrote:

> I suspect that the days of a steady increase in conservative voting 
> habits as
> age rises are well and truly over.  I wonder if the graph now shows a 
> reverse
> bell curve - with the young and the old more likely to vote 
> conservative
> (although not necessarily for the same reasons) and a group of 30-40 
> somethings
> in the middle more likely to vote......well, really what's left (pun 
> intended)?
>
> Which brings us back, as several people have pointed out already, to 
> the
> increasing irrelevance of old notions of left and right.  Surely these 
> words
> have been bled of any real political relevance except maybe 
> historically.
>
> Dare I bring up the compulsory voting chestnut again?  Would Sue's 
> 'bored
> looking' 20 year olds even bother turning up if they weren't legally 
> compelled
> to do so?
>
> P
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Susan Luckman [mailto:Susan.Luckman at unisa.edu.au]
> Sent: Tuesday, 12 October 2004 3:56 PM
> To: 'CSAA discussion list'
> Subject: RE: [csaa-forum] polling booth participant observation 101
>
> This thread is clearly demonstrating a need for a collective 
> debrief/catharsis
> re: the weekend on behalf of a number of us.
>
> Danny in terms of news from on the ground at the polling booths: I 
> spent most
> of the day handing out 'How to Votes cards' (HTVs) for the 'radical 
> greens' in
> Family First heartland (Adelaide's eastern suburbs, the electorates 
> served by
> this polling booth being mostly safe Liberal Sturt but also Adelaide, 
> one of
> the few bright spots on the weekend for the ALP).
>
> The people they sent to the booth were white, 'nice' and generally 
> pretty young
> (late 20s and 30s). Few people would directly or only take their HTV 
> cards, but
> the Family First/Liberal pairing was a relatively popular one. Making 
> a rampant
> observation fuelled only by a day's observation, while I certainly 
> wouldn't
> want to dismiss the moral angle at play in relation to FF as they were 
> clearly
> pushing a social, not just economic, agenda, they certainly downplayed 
> their
> religious underpinnings in their media and at the polling booth. As 
> one of
> their people tried to assure me: 'yes, there are a lot of Christians 
> who are
> members of FF but we're not a Christian organisation', the money 
> behind them
> comes from 'a few rich businessmen'. This man was also at pains to say 
> we'd
> also never had it so good, which was red flag to a bull for this 
> little poppet
> who launched off into a discussion of 'who are the 'we'?' which 
> genuinely
> appeared to existentially shake him up a little briefly. So I imagine 
> that at
> some level the comparison with NZ/Aotearoa works, but they are 
> appearing to
> downplay the overt religious angle in a fashion an organisation named 
> 'Destiny'
> cannot and the mainstream media did little to make this any clearer.
>
> Their TV campaign simply focussed on 'putting your family 
> first'--people seemed
> quite intelligently able to decode the ideological meaning behind 
> that--and
> keeping the balance of power away from the 'radical Greens' who will 
> give 'our
> kids' free marijuana--for the stragglers who hadn't yet ascertained 
> their
> ideological underpinnings.
>
> What really troubled me about the day however, and this bodes poorly 
> for the
> future if it's something they hold on to, were the number of bored 
> looking
> 18-20 year olds who went straight up to the Liberal ppl and took only 
> their
> HTV. There would have been just as many of this small age-based 
> demographic
> doing this as there were people over 30 driving European convertibles 
> making
> the same decision. I shouldn't have been surprised given I also teach 
> in this
> electorate and the looks on their faces today as I spoke about race and
> representation in the media made me realise that I truly am a raving 
> left wing
> loon, but the socially tuned in demographic is an aging one if my 
> experience
> with wonderful dedicated Green-voting retirees this last weekend is any
> indication.
>
> I also need to add that the FF/Liberal HTV combo was about as popular 
> as the
> ALP/Greens one - maybe we're one-anothers' conscience?
>
> Cheers, Sue
>
>
> ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
>
> dr susan luckman
>
> lecturer in communication
> school of communication, information and new media
> university of south australia
>
> gpo box 2471
> adelaide sa 5001
>
> ph: 08 8302 4152
> fax: 08 8302 4745
>
>
>
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