verging_on_random

How about that FM radio!

November 1, 2007 on 12:08 pm | In Uncategorized |

There are all sorts of reasons why people under the age of … IDK, 30 to pick an arbitrary age … seem so disengaged with public policy discussion, but one of the chief reasons must surely be the extent to which public discourse is dominated by boring old farts over 50 (present company excluded, natch).

Media commentary on social and economic and political matters is almost exclusively the province of white Anglo-Saxon males who still remember Bob Menzies and the Whitlam Government like they happened just yesterday. The same applies to federal parliament except that they’ve let a few token women in, but half the time the pollies are doing nothing more than continuing the juvenile antics that started in student unions in the 1960s and 70s.

Every now and then one of the self-appointed punditocracy makes a remark that unwittingly reveals how their thinking is locked in another era. Snarky whinges about computers and VCRs are a dead giveaway … I mean how would you expect to get respect from anyone under 30 if you complain in public that you’re hopeless with computers?

There’s a typical example of what I’m talking about in today’s Australian newspaper. It’s by the political editor Dennis Shanahan:

The grey army has put the Coalition back to its level before Mr Rudd became Opposition Leader in December but the FM and iPod-listening crowd has flocked to Labor and stuck.

Mr Howard is now at an all-time low among 18- to 34-year-olds as preferred prime minister, on 30 per cent, and Mr Rudd is at a record high of 57 per cent.

Bloody hell, Dennis, FM radio has been around for what, 30 years? Yet he obviously regards it as cutting edge technology and a marker of where the young folks are at … I bet he and the other News Ltd fossils yuk it up in the tea room about how all the ‘hip kids’ listen to this new-fangled rock’n'roll.

I wonder which party the GPS-using motorists have flocked to? Maybe Dennis will tell us in his next column.