Idle Democracies

Technology is giving the young a taste of real democracy. Idol TV shows have teens and twenty's in their millions SMS'ing votes for local singing candidates having seen them grow from tentative novice volunteer candidates to more polished finalists. Even that totalitarian 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre country China is having a taste of it with the Mengnui Sour Yoghurt Supervoice Girl competition bringing a TV audience of 400 million and 8 million text message votes. The Chinese authorities are a little worried about this and have begun insisting on less racy more downbeat folksy songs. This story comes from the Economist 10th September.

Contrast this to recent fallout from two fallen leaders in Australian democracy; Mark Latham, one time federal Labor leader and John Brogden, one time NSW Liberal leader. Both were thrust into politics at a young age and chosen by party machine committees rather than emerging from the local community preferences and the broad young democratic participation like in Australian Idol. Perhaps politics needs to take on board the new technology of democracy like the Idol shows to overcome the idle apathy that leaves 'democratic' decisions to others by default.

Maybe the emerging retired baby boomers will have the time to re-energise local political processes. This plus the ageing population might see a reversal of 'younging' of prime ministers apparent form our list in Resources http://www.findem.com.au/resources/displayResourcesArticle.php?id=47 We can approximate maturity to lead and time to show evidence of character within a persons life, by looking at percentiles of age profile of the population. We have added a Miscellaneous Chart in Research Centre which shows lower quartile(25th percentile), median(50th percentile) and upper quartile(75th percentile) of the Australian population from 1970 to 2030. http://www.findem.com.au/research/mischartsframes.php The 75th percentile is a good place to start. This was 46.7 years in 1970, 53.5 years in 2005 and will be 61.4 years in 2030. The last 3 prime ministers were 54 (Hawke 1983), 47 (Keating 1991) and 57 (Howard 1996) on appointment. All this suggests to FinDem that the Hon. Peter Howard Costello (now aged 48) should wait until he is about 55 to take over as prime minister.

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