Inside the Liberal Party’s ‘existential crisis’
The Liberal Party is fighting divisions within its own ranks, and a losing battle against demographics as highly motivated younger generations overwhelm its base.
If someone is not a socialist at age 20, goes an old political maxim, they have no heart. If they are not a conservative by 40, they have no head. It points to a general truism that people tend to become more conservative with age.
Political scientists such as
Professor Ian Mcallister of the Australian National University call this progression rightwards across the political spectrum the “life-cycle effect”.
For generations, says Mcallister, it remained typically the case that as people aged, their politics shifted. “They were left wing, and then they became centrist, and right when they got older.”
But not any longer. The latest generations of Australian voters – the Millennials, aged 25 to 40, and their younger peers, Gen Z – are different in that they show little sign of growing more conservative as they age.
For conservative politics, and for the Liberal Party in particular, Mcallister says, this amounts to an “existential crisis”. That might sound a little dramatic, but Mcallister drives the point home with data gleaned from a comprehensive, representative survey of some 3556 people, undertaken for the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project shortly after the May federal election.
Among voters aged 18 to 34, the Coalition picked up just over 18 per cent of the first preference vote. Labor and the Greens each were the first choice of 35.6 per cent of these younger voters. Almost 11 per cent went to “others”, including the teal independents.
Add those numbers together and political candidates to the left of the Coalition were preferred at a ratio of about four to one.
In fairness, Mcallister notes that the Labor Party also has its problems. It won the election, but its primary vote was the lowest in nearly 100 years. It lost a lot of votes to the Greens, which did particularly well among
renters, women and the university-educated.
But while both major parties have been losing vote share for a long time – this past federal election saw almost a third of the electorate direct their first preferences elsewhere – much of the lost Labor primary vote comes back to it in preferences.
Younger voters have been trending progressive for a long time. The Greens vote among this cohort has increased roughly sixfold since the start of this century.
The thing that kept the conservative parties competitive for most of that time was the life-cycle effect on older cohorts – the sheer number of Baby Boomers and the increased longevity of the silent generation that preceded them gave them great political clout.
Even at this year’s election, as support for the Morrison government crashed among younger voters, the distribution of votes among those over 55 was 44 per cent to the Liberals, Labor just under 35 per cent, and the Greens just under 9 per cent, according to the CSES survey.
But older voters are not the force they were. Millennials and Gen Zs will soon outnumber them. In parts of the country, particularly inner urban areas, they already do.
“So for the Liberals it is an existential crisis, because Baby Boomers and the silent generation are all moving out, and these new people are replacing them,” says Mcallister.
Unless the party changes in pretty fundamental ways, he suggests, it faces a bleak future.
Actually, its present is already fairly bleak.
Its vote share has fallen in 19 of the past 20 federal, state and territory elections, back to 2014. It holds majority government only in Tasmania. In the past couple of years it has been not just beaten but trounced at elections in Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland, the Northern Territory, ACT, and, just last weekend, in Victoria.
One irony of the federal election result is that by voting further left, electors effectively pushed the party further to the right. Six teal independents replaced Liberals from the moderate faction of the party, including the man widely predicted to be the next leader, Josh Frydenberg. In his absence, the party elected Peter Dutton, a hard-right hard man from Queensland. Dutton has shown more respect for the conventions of cabinet process and parliamentary democracy than Scott Morrison did, and is more trusted by his own people, and even by Labor, but he remains unpopular in the electorate. This month’s Resolve poll in the Nine newspapers showed Anthony Albanese was preferred prime minister by a margin of 53-19.
The party is deeply – and increasingly publicly – riven about how to respond. On Monday, former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull unleashed a fierce tweetstorm.
“At the heart of the Liberal Party’s defeat in the Victorian election on Saturday,” he wrote, “is the paradox that in this, the most small-l liberal state in Australia, the Liberal Party has been taken over by the hard right and is therefore at odds with the electorate whose support it seeks.
“This is, in large part, dictated by the right-wing angertainment complex, mostly Murdoch, which claims to speak for ‘the base’ overlooking the fact that the ‘base’ of any political party are those that habitually vote for it … And, as the regular Liberal voters shrink in numbers, the need to reach beyond the ‘base’ (however defined) to the centre is greater than ever. The angertainment media can monetise narrow audiences with divisive hate filled bile – but it is too narrow for electoral success.”
It was strong stuff and elicited a strong response. Peta Credlin – former chief-of-staff to Tony Abbott and now one of the hard-right coterie of commentators on Sky News – used her column in The Australian to attack Turnbull personally, and to savage the Victorian Liberal Party for adopting “Labor-lite” positions on gender issues, climate, Indigenous reconciliation and other social issues.
Credlin actually has a point: that the Liberal Party needs to find a way to distinguish itself from Labor. And Turnbull also has a point: they need to do it in a way that does not alienate the rising generation of voters.
Take the issue of women in the party. We know that the progressive shift among younger voters is substantially driven by women. Mcallister cites data from the CSES survey showing that 58 per cent of Greens voters were female and just 42 per cent male. Nine of the Greens’ federal representatives are women.
Labor instituted quotas almost 30 years ago and now women make up roughly 43 per cent of its members of parliament and senators.
Among Liberals, however, just 21 per cent are women. The number of Liberal women in the house of representatives actually fell at the election from 13 to nine.
After the election loss, the party undertook a review of its performance, to be conducted by former director Brian Loughnane – Peta Credlin’s husband – and one of the residual female MPS, the shadow Finance minister, Jane Hume. Their report was delayed out of concern it might affect last Saturday’s Victorian election, but this week some of it leaked. The review again ruled out formal quotas for women.
The same issue also is roiling the New South Wales Coalition, which already is a minority government and faces a difficult election next March. A succession of women have lost preselection contests, most recently the state’s Roads minister, Natalie Ward, who on Monday lost a battle for the safe seat of Davidson to a male former political staffer.
On Tuesday, Guardian Australia quoted an anonymous MP’S damning assessment of the situation: “The problem is that the average voter is a woman in her 30s. The average Liberal Party member is a bloke in his 60s. Go to any branch meeting and, besides a few young Liberals, it’s a grey wash.”
And on Wednesday, the NSW treasurer, Matt Kean, leader of the party’s moderate faction, went public with his concerns that the lack of diversity among preselectors threatened the party’s already-tenuous hold on government. He said he was “devastated” by Ward’s loss, and continued: “It’s clear that the branch membership is not reflecting the community. The community sent a very strong message not only to the Liberal Party but to all political parties that they want to see more diversity in our parliaments. We need to make sure that we are looking at our processes to ensure that we are reflecting the sentiment, otherwise the community is going to take it into its own hands …”
The party is swimming against the tide in other areas, too. Faith is one. Religious belief is in rapid decline in Australia. In last year’s census, the number of Millennials declaring “no religion” not only exceeded the number of Christians but the number of all religions combined.
While religious belief and progressive politics are not necessarily mutually exclusive, within the Liberal Party they largely are. The religious right is a growing presence, and in a number of jurisdictions, notably Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria, conservative churches have been implicated in branch-stacking.
Just a week ahead of the Victorian poll, party leader Matthew Guy dumped
Renee Heath, the Liberals’ No. 1 upper house candidate for the eastern region, over her involvement in the City Builders Church, where her parents are pastors.
Guy was moved to act after an investigation by The Age newspaper, which reported the church’s hostility to gay, trans and reproductive rights, and an alleged instruction by its global leader to infiltrate politics.
Heath protested that she did not share all the views of her parents, or the church leadership, and after the Liberals’ disastrous loss, she is set to be welcomed back into the party room.
Of course, the standout example of the influence of the religious right is Australia’s former prime minister, Scott Morrison, who declared his faith in miracles the night he was elected, and proceeded to govern as though by divine right – even, as we now know, having himself secretly appointed to five ministries. After his defeat, he preached a sermon in which he encouraged trust in God, but not government.
The point here is that the Liberal Party is struggling to get any traction with a rapidly changing electorate. Younger voters are more secular, better educated and less rusted on to any party, notwithstanding their generally progressive views.
Labor, in contrast, is riding the demographic shift – if not entirely comfortably – and broadly implementing policies relevant to these voters. It came to government promising much stronger action to combat climate change – a 43 per cent emissions reductions target, compared with 26-28 under the previous Coalition government. It is spending more on childcare and education – greatly expanding university and TAFE. The October budget committed $350 million in additional federal funding to deliver 10,000 affordable homes over five years from 2024.
Just this week it steered through parliament sweeping reforms to industrial relations, with the aim of getting wages moving up again, particularly for low-paid
“Millennials and Gen Z combined are now the largest voting cohort in the City of Greater Melbourne … And it’s going to be a compounding problem for the Liberals … The Liberal Party’s base is now over the age of 50, and basically an asset class.”
sectors that disproportionately employ women. And it legislated for a national anticorruption commission.
These are issues voters, particularly young and female voters, care about, as numerous surveys attest. Climate is the big one. On Monday, we will no doubt get further confirmation with the release of the 2022 Australian Election Study – the latest iteration of a comprehensive, data-heavy analysis of the political attitudes and behaviour of the Australian electorate, going back to 1987.
But the big picture is obvious already. The successful federal independent candidates, all of them women, focused their campaigns on climate, integrity in government and the status and treatment of women.
The Greens campaigned on similar issues but also focused on Australia’s growing economic inequality, particularly among younger people locked out of the housing market. The party increased its numbers in the house from one to three and also returned 12 senators, which left it just one vote shy of holding the balance of power in the upper house. The crucial swing vote in the senate is David Pocock who, like the lower house teals, was financially assisted by the Climate 200 movement and defeated an incumbent Liberal.
And they are all making their presence felt. It was the support of Pocock and the
Greens that enabled Labor’s industrial relations reforms. Even though Labor did not need the votes of the lower house independents to get its national anticorruption commission passed, they drove and shaped it.
Notably, when the house voted to censure Morrison this week for his convention-trashing secret assumption of multiple ministries, every one of the teals, plus the Greens’ Adam Bandt, spoke eloquently. Of course they did; returning integrity and accountability to politics after the Morrison years were core commitments that got them elected.
Interestingly, though, after their stellar results at the federal election, Greens and independents did not do as well in Victoria, which has led some observers to suggest the teal/green wave may be receding.
But Simon Holmes à Court, the force behind Climate 200, which backed independents at both polls, argues seats in parliament are not the only measure of success. The mere presence of independents at elections drives progressive change, he says.
Given Victoria’s election-funding laws, which confer a huge financial advantage to the legacy parties, the independents performed strongly, in his view. And while both Premier Daniel Andrews and Opposition Leader Guy were unpopular, “it was nothing like the disgust and anger that people have towards Morrison”, Holmes à Court tells The Saturday Paper.
Kos Samaras, director of the political consultancy Redbridge, has worked for both Labor and teals, and has no doubt non-major party candidates will do better next time, and the time after that. It is demographically ordained, he says.
“In 2012, the Boomers and older made up 57 per cent of the voters in Victoria. They now make up 38 per cent of the roll,” Samaras says. “Millennials and Gen Z combined are now the largest voting cohort in the City of Greater Melbourne … up to about 40 per cent.
“And it’s going to be a compounding problem for the Liberals, because by 2026 Boomers and older will be down to about 30 per cent, and this younger cohort will be up to 45 per cent of the vote.”
“The Liberal Party’s base is now over the age of 50, and basically an asset class.”
And these demographic shifts are not true just of Victoria, but nationally.
Which brings us to two final, crucial points about the younger cohort. The first is that they represent the deepening problem of income inequality – they have relatively few assets compared with their seniors.
Between 1981 and 2016, homeownership rates among 25 to 34-year-olds fell from more than 60 per cent to 45 per cent.
Says Mcallister: “Assets are much more important in shaping how people vote than occupational class. So I mean, it really doesn’t matter if you’re a tradie or a professor. What matters is the assets you own. And it’s not just home ownership. It’s share ownership. It’s an investment property. It’s a self-managed super fund …”
The Greens in particular have positioned themselves as the champions of generation rent. And Labor knows it, hence its recent commitments to expanding the housing supply.
And the younger cohort understands the electoral system very well.
“This is the most savvy, switchedon voter cohort, I think, in our history,” says Samaras.
“They will vote tactically. We saw that in Kooyong, for example, where the Green vote collapsed, and the Labor vote collapsed. And it all went to Monique Ryan. They purposely voted for her to get rid of Josh Frydenberg.”
So, to update the quote from the top of this story for a sobering contemporary reality: If someone is not a leftie at age 20, they have no heart. If they are still a leftie at 40, they have no house.
And so much more than that drives this cohort of smart progressives. It’s climate and gender issues and job insecurity, and integrity in government and a raft of other issues.
Not only do they have a plethora of votes, they know how to use them. And that is very bad news indeed for the party of the asset class.