Your NSW post-election editorial “Another slide into bigger spending and more debt” and Alexander Downer’s “Times don’t suit the Liberals, but the cycle will turn” (March 27) are remarkable in many respects, but one in particular: their contempt for electorates that do not see the world through their deeply political and ideological prisms.

The articles are reminiscent of the days in the mid to late 1960s when Labor, having been out of office at state and federal level for nearly 20 years, blamed a heavily conservative electorate for not understanding its vision for the country.