Gen X Julia v boomer Tony

For the first time in Australia’s history we are facing a choice between a generation X and baby-boomer candidate. Tony Abbott, born in 1957, falls on the baby-boomer side of the fence, while Julia Gillard just squeaks into the first year of generation X, if you accept the wikipedia definition, although both are close enough to the 1961 cut off to be considered cuspers.

Corporate Australia has already made the plunge with a handful of generation X chief executives appointed in the past couple of years. National Australia Bank chief executive Cameron Clyne, who was born in 1968, won the top job in January 2009, while Alan Joyce, who made his way into the world in 1966, was appointed chief executive of Qantas in 2008. Both roles could have gone to more seasoned and experienced baby-boomer challengers, but ultimately the boards bent in favour of, well, I guess you could call it the X factor.

Despite being tantalisingly close to the 1961 gen X cut off, there’s almost nothing in Abbott’s background that would pull him into the realm of gen X. Sure, he faffed around until he was in his 30s before getting married, but that included lots of right wing student politics, boxing, a Rhodes scholarship, a turn in a seminary and giving up a child he thought was his for adoption.

Abbott has lived through the struggle between traditional values and personal fulfilment which is such a strong theme for the baby-boomer generation.

Gillard, on the other hand, is still faffing about, going from left-wing student politics into industrial relations law, then into big-people’s politics first as a staff member then as a candidate. She didn’t need to get married or to have kids, or fulfil and set of social expectations regarding procreation. She could just get on with her career.

However, the real test lies in the realm of cyber space, and it is on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter that Gillard runs gen X rings around Abbott.

Updated several times a day, Gillard’s Twitter has more than 26,000 followers, and follows more than 10,000 people out there in the Twitterverse. Abbott’s Twitter has a shade under 13,000 followers, and will no doubt win more in the next couple of weeks. But he only follows 20 people, all of them other Liberal politicians, with whom one can only assume he already speaks regularly. The notion that social networking should be a two-way conversation is apparently lost on whichever staff member set up the page.

The situation is even more dire on Facebook, where a tad over 8500 people “like” Tony Abbott’s page, while more than 23,000 “like” a group called “Friends don’t let friends vote for Tony Abbott”. Gillard, by comparison, has 37,000 people who “like” her Facebook page, and there is a smattering of anti-Gillard pages, most of which make some reference to governing the country from a kitchen, and these have gathered up to 5000 followers.

Although social networking played an important role in funding the 2008 Obama election campaign, and encouraging young people to take part in the elections, there’s no indication of how it will play out in this country. And while the votes of generations X and Y are those most likely to be influenced in cyberspace in this intergenerational showdown, the web may well simply become one more forum for preaching to the converted rather than rallying new support.

BRW

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