dls182 said:
21 million is pretty small. The fact that 72,000 people bothered to take part in this is significant.
As mentioned above, the Work Choices survey didn't have that many more responses, and that effected far more of the population.
Finally another Australian who knows what he talks about!
It's also a lot worse for Australia's population than one would think. Most of our citizens are over 40, and a very large portion of those people are above 50.
This means that there are very few people who are even of the average age that most gamers are (average age is the mid-twenties, but of coarse that's only the average), even then compared to most countries Australia has one of the lowest percentage of people who own/play console/computer games in western world. So there's obviously not too many people who are going to be able to sign the petition, let alone know about it.
Let's also add to the issue that GAME is one of the multiple games retailers that have chains in Australia. EB is one of the major competitors in Australia, so is Game Traders, not to mention other smaller chains and one-off family stores, though GAME is holds a decent portion, but is no means leading (despite offering the best deals, seriously, here in Australia EB often gives $15 for a game traded in if it's new release, perfect condition and a popular, whereas GAME gives a good $60 or $70 for the same games, plus bonuses for trading multiple games and new games trade in for even more again against other new games, they're willing to extend the 7 day no-questions game return for out of town-ers like myself, new games in Australia have a RRP of $110, and even with inflation that's a sickening issue, many issues like taxes and inflation issues, I won't go into it here), so they've lost a lot of potential signers due to all those other retailers, adding to that issue is the fact that a lot of people purchase games over the internet now to save money, not to mention great programs like STEAM. Let's also consider how many people completely ignore petitions or aren't aware of them despite being public knowledge. A good example again is Work Choices which was added in by our former government, it caused outrage across all of Australia, except for some very rare jobs which were able to benefit from the change, employers as well. That petition had 80,000 responses, barely more than the GAME petition. This issue was one of the driving forces for having our former Government voted out by a landslide. Our new Booger-Eating leader (it's most likely on youtube now, him sitting in the UN conference, picking his nose and eating it before the world, thinking no one was looking) may be quite terrible as well, but at least he removed the damned issue.
All things considered, 72,000 signatures is unbelievable in Australia, and considering the subject and the affected population our Government will be forced to pay attention (and we already had a lot of R18+ support to begin with, just a few dipshits like Atkinson)!
