The very old party base and email

Climate scorches Liberals' unity

In my arguments about the "grassroots" campaign apparently waged by Liberal Party rank and file to get Turnbull to delay the ETS, I have mentioned that the average age of the party members was pretty old, and older people are much more likely (for unclear reasons) to not believe in AGW.

Well, it seems I was certainly right about the age of party membership:

When the Victorian Liberal Party conducted a review after the Howard government's defeat, it found that the average age of its members was 60-plus. Few younger Australians are climate change sceptics, and a party that retreats to an unrepresentative base is unlikely to be elected.

The other curious thing, though, is that various Liberals have been claiming to have received "thousands" of emails from concerned constituents. Paul Sheehan writes today:

''I have never seen anything like it,'' said Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells when I called to ask why she publicly abandoned Turnbull's leadership on Friday. By yesterday afternoon her office had logged almost 8000 emails and calls opposing the proposed emissions trading scheme.

There is something pretty fishy about this, if you ask me. As the average age of the party member seems to be so old, surely there is a smaller proportion of them who are internet users in the first place.

Paul Sheehan explains how Alan Jones was leading this anti-CPRS campaign in Sydney. I wouldn't mind betting that there has been some young Jones acolytes behind the flood of emails, and that it significantly over-represents the size of the concern.

UPDATE: James Farrell at Club Troppo also worries about Alan Jones undue influence in national affairs. Here are the key paragraphs:

...if it’s true that Jones inspired the letter campaign, it raises two issues. One is the ability of radio ranters like him to exert influence vastly out of proportion to their knowledge and wisdom. This influence corrupts the democratic process: ideally, citizens take information from a range of sources (including the superior blogs) in the market for ideas, and weigh them up, rather than adopt fully formed opinions from one shrill source. It’s not just that these broadcasters are propaganda tools for vested interests; the type of individual whose opininated ravings rate highly also tends to be motivated by quite arbitrary personal prejudices and preoccupations.

In Jones’s case a relevant foible is that he can’t happen to stand anyone who refuses to be sycophantic. He is vindictiveness itself when not shown due deference. It was astounding to see Turnbull stand up to him in the interview last month (read Sheehan for some highlights), and I confess to having lazily thought to myself, it’s nice to see a federal leader refusing to be cowed by this demagogue. What I’d forgotten is that they grovel for a good reason, and in the last week we may have seen the chickens coming home to roost. Now, it’s possible that Jones helped destroy Turnbull at the behest wealthy and powerful interests, but — and this is my point — it may just have been because Turnbull got under his skin. And that isn’t a healthy basis for determining the course of climate policy.

I've never understood Jones' appeal as a broadcaster.