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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

The Liberal Party are trying to resurrect their popularity after a devastating loss this year, under the leadership of Scott Morrison.

But can changing the personalities and the style at the top, make a difference? Or is there something deeper behind the decline in the party’s fortunes?

A study published yesterday indicates only one in four voters under the age of 40 voted for the Coalition – and that could be unlikely to change.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe, on how this generation of younger voters are changing the assumptions we’ve had about the electorate and why all the major parties need to adapt.

It’s Tuesday, December 6.

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RUBY:

Mike, the Liberal Party has now had two pretty terrible election results in a row. First there was the federal loss and then more recently we saw them really fail to gain any ground at all in Victoria. So, when you look at the kind of year that the Liberal Party is having, do you see a pattern here?

MIKE:

Oh, absolutely. And you're right, they've had two terrible losses now in a row, but they've had more than that over the past couple of years. They've been lurching from loss to loss.

The Liberals were all but wiped out in the Western Australia election.

Archival Tape – Antony Green:

“Well, look, it was a complete, not a landslide. There's no other word for it David.”

MIKE:

A one-term Liberal government lost in South Australia.

Archival Tape – Newsreader:

“South Australians have swept away the Marshall Liberal government, choosing Peter Malinauskas and his team to lead us beyond the pandemic.”

MIKE:

The Northern Territory, they lost to Labor.

Archival Tape – Newsreader:

“Now the Labor Party is on track to form majority government in the Northern Territory after the first night of counting.”

MIKE:

Queensland: they were trounced again by Labor.

Archival Tape – Newsreader:

“Labor not only held strong in north Queensland but turned blue regions red in the south east, securing more than a 5 per cent swing.”

MIKE:

The only place where they're in majority government still in the country is Tasmania and New South Wales they're in minority government and facing a pretty perilous election in March. So if you look across the country, things are looking pretty dire for them. And the one common factor I think you would say is that everywhere you look, the young people are rejecting them. You know, younger voters are just not voting liberal anymore.

RUBY:

And that is intuitive in some ways, isn't it, Mike? Because there is this common wisdom that young people are more likely to vote for the left, whereas that the bulk of conservative voters tend to be a bit older.

MIKE:

Yes, you're absolutely right. You know, in fact, the old political maxim was, you know, that if someone was not a socialist at the age of 20, they had no heart. If they were still a socialist at 40, they had no head, you know, and that points to the old general truism, you know, that people tend to get more conservative as they age. But for this story, I was speaking with a political scientist at the ANU, Professor Ian McAllister, and and he's been following sort of electoral behaviour for a long time via something called the Australian Election Study, which is a huge exercise that's carried out, has been carried out after every federal election since 1987. To give us insights into why not only how people voted, but why they voted the way they did. And he says the interesting development of the past couple of decades in politics is that this progression sort of rightward across the political spectrum, that had held true for generations, is no longer true among younger voters, which is to say they start out voting for more progressive parties and they keep right on doing so.

So we're talking here about the millennial generation, Gen Z. So the oldest ones now, the oldest millennials are now about 40. So this is a big shift. You know, what it means is that as older conservatives drop out of the picture, they're not being replaced because these younger ones coming through are maintaining their progressive politics as they age. So this phenomenon of these newer cohorts of voters maintaining their political position as they get older, it's obviously a major threat to the major parties, both Labor and the Liberals, but particularly the Liberals, because their support base is typically amongst the oldies for want of a better term.

RUBY:

So, Mike, if young people aren't voting for the liberals, where are their votes going?

MIKE:

Well, that's an interesting thing. I mean, according to the survey that Ian McAllister was referring to at the last federal election. Amongst people aged under about 35, Only about 18 per cent went for the Liberals and about 35 per cent went to Labor, and about 35 per cent went to the Greens. So it's a huge shift in that way and this indicates something else too.
This isn't just a threat to the Liberal Party, this is a threat to the Labor Party. You know, these younger voters are very progressive and they're moving against both the major parties. In fact, you know, if you look at the long term trend, the votes of the majors are going down over a very long period, basically since World War Two. And at the last election, they were at a record low. Roughly a third of the electorate voted for other parties, particularly the Greens. And of course some of the progressive independents that we've come to call the Teals.

RUBY:

Hmm. And if we dig down a bit more into why this is happening, can you tell me more about the concerns and the specific policies that make people who belong to these generations, millennials and people in Gen Z? Less likely to give their primary vote to a major party and more likely to instead vote for maybe the Greens or maybe an Independent.

MIKE:

Well, of course, a big one. A big one is climate change, but there are other issues that are more keenly felt amongst the younger voters, too, according to McAllister. One other big thing that is driving their voting behaviour is simply the assets that they hold. It's really wealth and assets that are one of the strong determinants of why people get more conservative as they age. It's not merely the fact that they age. It's the fact that they accumulate more stuff and then they want to protect that, and that's why they vote conservative.

And as McAllister was telling me, what really matters doesn't matter if you're a tradie or if you're a professor or what your profession is. The big determinant of your political allegiance or a big determinant of your political allegiance is the assets you own. So, you know, not just home ownership, but share ownership, whether you have an investment property, whether you have a self-managed super fund, if you have all of those, you're probably a liberal voter.

But if you look at what's been happening on that front, I dredged up some of the statistics on this. And between 1991 and 2016, for example, home ownership rates amongst 25 to 34 year olds fell from more than 60 per cent to 45 per cent, which is way below the older demographic. You know, retirees are still, on balance, very well housed.

So there are no real policies on the table. Also, I think you would say that will radically shift this dynamic, you know, away from Labor and the minor parties. You know, the Greens are very big with policies that target what we might call generation rent at the last election and they got a lot of votes for it. Labor has obviously noticed because they've committed to a social housing policy, they're going to spend a lot of money trying to get more supply into the market. Nowhere near as ambitious as the Greens, but still they're doing it. The Liberal Party, on the other hand, has not really been speaking to those concerns for a long time now. To the extent they've had housing policies, they've been things that have been proven not to work, you know, like first home buyer grants, things like that, which really do nothing except push up the price of real estate and in the end wind up benefiting the sellers, not the buyers. So they're going to have a good long look at their policies if they want to start, you know, fighting back against this demographic tide.

RUBY:

We’ll be back after this.

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RUBY:

Mike, it sounds like the Liberal Party is looking at the possibility that the majority of an entire generation - a younger generation might never vote for it. And up until this point it seems like the party hasn’t really formulated many policies that would speak directly to that generation, to young people. So does that look likely to change? Are there signs that the party is acknowledging that this might be a problem, or looking to try and turn this around?

MIKE:

Not to any significant extent, I have to say. If we take one issue, right, the Liberal Party's relationship to women. We know from the data that a large part of this, this sort of leftward drift amongst younger people is led by young women. So, you know, after the federal election loss, the Liberals have undertaken a review of the way the party performed at the election. It has been conducted by a former party director, Brian Loughnane, who's the husband of PETA Credlin. The Sky News right wing commentator and one of the surviving Liberal federal MPs after the last election, the shadow finance minister Jane Hume.

So first of all, their report was delayed out of concern it might impact last Saturday's Victorian election, but then last week some of it leaked out and you know, it's close to being finalised and it's going to look at a whole bunch of things, but amongst them is how they get more women into the party. You know, Labor's managed it because they've had a long established quota system. But the key fact that leaked out about this review is that they have once again rejected the idea of a quota system. And speaking about the Victorian election results, Hume was pretty clear about why the Liberals lost. She said it was because multicultural communities, younger people and women were big gaps in their representation. And she said, and I'm quoting, “we aren't appealing to them right now and we need to deal with that if we want to be truly representative. We're supposed to be the party for all Australia, which means we can't narrowcasting our message or our membership.”

But then of course, she went right on ABC Radio and rejected quotas for bringing more women into the party.

Archival Tape – Jane Hume:

“So there is a compelling business case to have more women.”

Archival Tape – Newsreader:

“So, how should they do it?”

Archival Tape – Jane Hume:

“Well, but the other issue that is important with women is where the votes come from. And there is no doubt, absolutely no doubt, that fewer women are voting for the Liberal Party than they used to, and particularly in that cohort of professional women. And that's something that we've seen on a federal level and a state level, and it is something that we need to address, there is no doubt about it. Now, I think the quotas as an answer to both of those problems is a very, very blunt instrument indeed. We actually had more women running at this election.”

MIKE:

You know, so they're talking a good game, but their actions aren't backing it up, I guess you'd say.

RUBY:

Yeah, it sounds like that. At least attempting to identify what might be going wrong for them. But the idea of actually taking steps that might change that are still a long way off.

MIKE:

Yeah, that's right. And part of the reason for this is they're in this difficult situation where they're trying to appeal to a new demographic, but they still don't want to alienate their existing voter base, you know, the older cohort that they're appealing to. And even as these younger people have come through the system and, you know, continuing to vote for progressive parties. To this point, or until quite recently, the sheer number of baby boomers who did get more conservative as they aged and the sort of increased longevity of people even older than that, because of better health care and what have you, gave the conservative parties great political clout. And they do continue to vote heavily conservative. You know, even at the last election when Scott Morrison was wildly unpopular, many more of the over 55 voted for the Conservatives than for Labor and hardly any of them. I think about 3 per cent voted for the Greens. So clearly the Liberal Party is substantially holding that demographic, but older voters aren't the force that they were because, you know, to put it bluntly, they’re dying out.

So, you know, millennials and Gen Zs will soon outnumber the boomers and older all around the nation. You know, in parts of the country like inner-Melbourne it's already the case, but it's going to be a spreading phenomenon across the nation and a huge problem for the Liberals. And, you know, I might add in the long term, longer term for Labor too, but particularly for the Liberals.

RUBY:

Yeah, it's going to be really interesting to see how both major parties grapple with that change in demographics, which I think is perhaps a lot closer than either of them really realise. And just to go back to the Liberal Party, this message that Hume others within the party are now trying to bring to their attention, that they have to try to reach a broader demographic, that they have to be relevant to more people, particularly to women. Does that message stand a chance of being heard, do you think, by a party where a lot of moderates have been wiped out and the right of the party is really in control under the leadership of Peter Dutton?

MIKE:

Well, you're entirely right. I mean that was one of the odd things of the last election was that as people voted for more progressive parties, it had the effect, in a way, of making the Liberals more right wing, because the people who got wiped out with the moderates, they felt Teal candidates. So on balance, the party is more conservative than it was. So, first observation doesn't look promising. And obviously Peter Dutton is not an appealing figure, particularly for young people.

But I would suggest that Dutton is really just a symptom of the problem, as was Scott Morrison, as was Tony Abbott. And the Liberal Party's basic problem is that the party membership has become increasingly out of step with the wider community,

And of course it's the party membership who are the ones who select the candidates.

But I might also perhaps plant the seed of another idea, which is that as the vote share of both the major parties continues its long term decline, it may be that in the not too distant future, we wind up with sort of multi-party governments like we see in a lot of European countries. It may also be that the Liberal Party has to split and reconstitute itself in a sense as a Conservative Party and a more progressive party and in effect in a sense it already has because that's what the Teals are. The Teals are not yet a party, but they are the moderate wing of the Liberal Party. And so unless the Liberals wake up to themselves pretty darn quick, that's going to be the future.

RUBY:

Mike, thank you so much for your time.

MIKE:

Thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Protestors in Iran are calling for a three-day national strike this week, in ongoing action targeting the government of the Islamic Republic.

The strike action comes after Iran’s Attorney General revealed over the weekend that the Parliament and the Judiciary are reviewing the country’s laws regarding the clothing of women, but with both branches currently controlled by conservative factions it’s unclear if a review will relax the laws.

And…

A major cryptocurrency exchange based in Australia is slashing 40 per cent of its staff.

Swyftx is making layoffs to prepare in advance for the potential of a quote: “worst-case scenario”, according to an internal memo sent to staff. The cuts follow the dramatic decline of the crypto market and the collapse of the FTX exchange – which was once valued at 32 billion US dollars.

I’m Ruby Jones - this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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