Source : THE AGE NEWS
If the Liberals have any sense, they won’t waste too much time blaming their shocking election result on Peter Dutton, Donald Trump, Cyclone Alfred, the party secretariat, an unready shadow ministry or any other “proximate cause”, as economists say. Why not? Because none of these go to the heart of their party’s problem.
The Liberals’ problem is that Australia has changed but their party hasn’t. They’re like someone still driving a Holden Commodore: a great car in its day but looking pretty outdated today.
Illustration by Simon Letch
In other words, the Libs’ problem is structural, not merely cyclical. It can’t be fixed just by finding a more attractive leader – not unless that leader has the authority to make what many Liberal MPs and party members would regard as radical changes.
Liberal leaders have been aware of their party’s two key problems for some years without facing up to them. The first is their “women problem”. While Labor has put much effort into increasing the proportion of women among its parliamentary members and ministers, the Libs have been quite half-hearted about it, refusing to use quotas to speed up the process.
I’m sure Labor people have been sincere in believing a roughly 50-50 split should become the norm, but I’m equally sure they’re aware of the political advantage that comes with making sure they attract the votes of at least half the female voters, and preferably more.
Go back far enough and you find Australia’s women slightly more attracted to the Coalition than Labor. Not these days. The Australian National University’s Australian Election Study, which uses polling of people after they’ve voted – at the democracy sausage stage – found that, in the previous, 2022 federal election, while 38 per cent of male respondents voted for the Coalition, only 32 per cent of females did.
I’d be surprised if that disparity was much reduced on Saturday, and not surprised if it had increased. Surely a party incapable of attracting its share of the female half of the voting population is a party without a bright future.
Did you notice Monday’s photo of Labor’s just-elected federal members in Brisbane? Seven broadly smiling, youngish women. A lot of them who’d just taken seats from the Libs.
And, as I’m sure you have noticed, all the teals are women. Could there be a message in there somewhere? If so, Labor’s got it, but the Libs haven’t yet.
Another relevant finding from the study of the 2022 election: whereas only 9 per cent of men voted for the Greens, for women it was 16 per cent. My guess is that a lot of those women voting Greens were young.
Teal independents Kate Chaney, Sophie Scamps, Allegra Spender, Kylea Tink, Zoe Daniel and Monique Ryan. Credit: James Brickwood
You surely can’t have missed the news that Saturday’s was the first election in which the great bulge of Baby Boomers has finally been outnumbered by the Millennials and Gen Z, which now account for 40 per cent of the electorate.
With some Zoomers yet to reach voting age, the younger share of the electorate can’t fail to grow as the Boomers start falling off the twig. (Last week I had to go to Melbourne for the funeral of a mate. I stayed with another mate whose wife died last year. Could mortality be catching up with the invincible Boomers?)
So let’s shift from gender to age. The 2022 electoral study observes that “across the democratic world, younger voters tend to prefer parties and candidates of the left and centre-left more so than older voters”. But each Australian election study since 1987 has found that as age increases, so, too, does Coalition support.
In 2022, however, the Coalition’s share of the vote fell in almost every age group, but especially among the youngest age groups. Question is: will today’s younger voters drift to the Coalition as they age, as previous younger generations have?
Probably not. As the Millennials aged between 2016 and 2022, the Coalition’s share of their votes actually fell from 38 per cent to 25 per cent. In both 2019 and 2022, only 26 per cent of Zoomers voted for the Coalition, with 67 per cent voting for the Greens or Labor.
“No other generation records such skewed preferences at similar early stages of the life course,” the 2022 study concludes.
What could possibly cause the latest batch of younger voters to be so down on the Coalition that they may never grow more conservative as they grow older?
Well, one candidate is “intergenerational inequity”. Home affordability has been an issue for yonks, but never has it been as big as it was this time. “How come our parents had little trouble buying a home of their own while we’re finding it almost impossible?”
Until now, politicians have shed only crocodile tears for first home buyers – with the most openly unsympathetic of them being the Liberals’ second Menzies, John Howard.
But home affordability is just one of the ways the system of taxes and benefits has been biased in favour of the well-off elderly – the self-proclaimed “self-funded retirees” – at the expense of younger, working taxpayers.
Who was it who did most to advantage better-off single-income families who could afford private schools and private health insurance? The same John Howard. He rejigged the system to benefit the Liberal heartland, but now that heartland has resigned from the party.
Why? Many reasons, no doubt, but one that stands out: the Liberals’ lip-service-only support for action to reduce climate change. Turns out women worry more about climate change than men, and young people worry more than oldies – for obvious reasons. Thinks: I’ll be dead before it gets intolerable.
Ever since Labor’s Julia Gillard introduced a carbon tax in 2012, the Libs, while denying they were climate-change deniers, have taken the low road: don’t worry about climate, just stop electricity prices rising.
If the Liberals want a future, a future with more votes from women and younger people, the place to start is getting fair dinkum about climate change.
Read more on Labor’s landslide election win
- Inside story: How the Coalition campaign was a catastrophe months in the making p5lvqj
- Some seats are still too close to call. Here are all the races that remain in doubt – plus every seat that’s changed hands p5lw3y
- Interactive: See how your polling booth voted in this election p5lvgw
- Live results: Track every seat in the country p5lw47
- Live blog: Anthony Albanese plans second term, Liberals plan a leadership change p5lwi7
