John Black: That's right, the National Party is traditionally run by wealthy people who represent poor people, and the Greens tends to be run by lower income people representing rich people but who seem to have a view that their constituency is decidedly bolshy in terms of economic policy when in fact there's absolutely no evidence of that at all, and in fact the evidence is to the contrary.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: So in fact if green voters see green political parties threatening their income stream, they'll dump them. Is that how you see it?
John Black: In a New York second. This is not rocket science. People vote politically as consumers, and I fall back on my old Marxist historians for that little piece of wisdom. People do not vote to lose money, that's a case in point. Your green voter now has shares, your green voter now doesn't have children. Because they don't have children they have money, they have investment homes, they have shares. The simple correlations between ownership of investments, including shares, and the top income group was +0.94. You don't get any stronger than that. I mean, share ownership is clustered in then top quartile, green votes are clustered in the top quartile. Green voters are born overseas, they're the kind of people who were getting $100,000+ in WA on the old AWAs. They were into them with their ears back. These are rich, cosmopolitan, internationally qualified people.
2 comments:
"Green voters are born overseas, they're the kind of people who were getting $100,000+ in WA on the old AWAs. They were into them with their ears back. These are rich, cosmopolitan, internationally qualified people."
Wrong on all counts for this little black duck......
Or they are civil servants living off the fat of bloated budgets or students living hand to mouth but with the lifestyle to match. The latter group will change votes as they acrue responsibilites. The natural move from idealists to pragmatists.
Post a Comment