Younger people. Voters aged in the early 40s and younger didn’t make up a majority of the electorate at this year’s poll, but they will by the time of the next when it’s due in 2028. And these generations are a dire problem for the Coalition.
These are so-called Millennials – born between 1981 and 1996 – and the group following, Generation Z – born between 1997 and 2012. A mere quarter of Millennial women vote Coalition, and 28 per cent of men, according to Redbridge polling.
And Gen Z voters are even less inclined to the Libs. About one in five is a likely Coalition voter, “and that’s on a good day”, says Kos Samaras of Redbridge political consultancy.
The younger the voter, the lower their propensity to support the Coalition. A Redbridge poll in today’s Australian Financial Review shows that, among women aged 18 to 34, just 13 per cent would vote for the Coalition, says Samaras. Another 700,000 Gen Z voters will surge onto the electoral rolls over the next three years.
You might think that the loss of the cities, women and voters under the age of 45 would be disastrous enough. But no. The Coalition also alienated Chinese-Australians during Scott Morrison’s prime ministership and failed to win them back under Peter Dutton.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley dismissed Jacinta Price from the Coalition frontbench on Wednesday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Of the 50 most multicultural federal seats in Australia, the Coalition won exactly two at the May election. These are Berowra, centred around Hornsby in northern Sydney, and the adjacent Mitchell in The Hills area. Both have substantial ethnic Indian minorities.
But even those two were put at risk by Price’s statement that Indians were brought into Australia by Labor because they’d vote Labor. She later conceded that this was wrong – most were actually admitted by the Coalition – but she refused to say sorry for the implied insult that they’re part of a partisan political dirty trick, rather than fellow Australians.
So much for Sussan Ley’s stated aim to “modernise” the Liberal Party. It’s plainly a survival imperative. Yet the party is giving the impression that it’s not progressing, but regressing.
It didn’t have to be this way. In fact, it wasn’t this way. The Liberals were the party that pronounced the White Australia policy to be obsolete. Gough Whitlam finished dismantling the policy, but it was the Liberal Party under Harold Holt that began its demolition as early as 1966.
Australia changed. It’s become more multicoloured. And the Liberals helped engineer this. “John Howard pivoted the immigration intake from family reunion to skilled labour because we were retreating from manufacturing and moving towards services,” says Samaras. “And that meant more Chinese and Indians. And when we heard it, everyone in Labor said, ‘Wow, the Libs are going to kill us’. Because Chinese and Indians are more aspirational, with conservative social views, and Howard knew what he was doing. It was good policy and beautiful politics. And now they [the Coalition] have ruined it” for themselves.
Loading
Yes, Australia changed. And the Liberals have not only failed to keep up. They’ve regressed. A marker point. When Pauline Hanson first ran for federal parliament, she was an endorsed Liberal candidate. But the moment she disparaged Indigenous Australians, the Liberals disendorsed her.
And Howard maintained a hard line against her and her One Nation Party for years, ordering them to be put last on Liberal how-to-vote cards.
But today, Price singles out Indian-Australians for criticism, refuses to apologise, and no one in the Liberals is suggesting publicly that she should be disendorsed. Ley eventually sacked her from the frontbench. Not because of her comments about Indian-Australians a week earlier, but because she refused to express confidence in her leader.
And at the May election, the Liberals agreed to preference swaps with One Nation in some areas. Australia has become more multicultural and the Liberals have become more intolerant, it seems.
Loading
“There’s no pathway to government for us unless we perform significantly better in metropolitan, suburban seats and seats with high multicultural populations,” says Sharma. That prospect is more distant today than it was last month.
And beyond committing this entirely gratuitous offence against Indian-Australians, the Liberals spent the week squabbling about it. It was bad enough that the Nationals waged the Eight-Day War against their supposed Coalition partner after the election. Now they’re exposed as riven factionally among themselves as well.
The Labor Party is watching on in quiet astonishment tinged with schadenfreude. “What are they thinking?” is a refrain among senior Labor people. But that’s the thing. There is some thinking going on internally in the form of the three reviews Ley has commissioned – one into the election campaign, another into climate and energy policy, and a third into how to modernise – but they’ve not yet borne results.
And in the absence of thinking, they’re feeling. They’ve fallen mindlessly into the same self-destructive syndrome they suffered from during Anthony Albanese’s first term. They are not thinking about how to win elections. They’re trying to feel love.
Loading
The electorate rejected them punishingly, and they’re turning to their base for comfort and consolation. Not all, but a good many of them are pandering to their base and to the Murdoch media. They perform for their branch members, to win “likes” for their social media efforts, and to ingratiate themselves with Sky After Dark.
Among this ecosystem, Jacinta Price is a hero. “She’s very appealing to older, whiter regional voters,” as Samaras puts it. Which is fine, but fatal. The Coalition didn’t lose because it lacked support from this shrivelling ecosystem; it lost because its support is sinking everywhere else.
The Murdoch media is an apparent ally, but it is not working to the Coalition’s advantage. The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and Sky After Dark urge the Coalition ever rightwards on the spectrum. And further from mainstream Australia.
As I’ve observed before, love from the Murdoch media is the siren song that lures smitten Liberals onto the rocks of electoral disaster. Labor strategists are stunned and delighted at the Coalition’s easy credulousness in the hands of Murdoch.
The political agenda is about to turn towards climate and energy policy. This will pit the sentiment of the Coalition’s base against the priorities of the larger electorate. The Coalition’s collective maturity is about to be tested severely. Despite Sussan Ley’s best efforts, its recent conduct suggests that it will fail.
Peter Hartcher is political editor.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.
