Is the Liberal Party aging out of Australian politics?

In recent years, the Liberal Party has experienced a series of large electoral defeats at state and federal levels.

Multiple state and federal leaders have come and gone in quick succession; four Liberal state/territory governments were voted out after a single term; the coalition with the National Party is the weakest it has been since 1987’s ‘Joh for Canberra’ campaign; and polls from the last few months suggest that were an election held tomorrow, One Nation could become the federal opposition.

The “liberal and conservative era” in Australia has apparently come to an end – at least according to political journalist Paul Kelly.

Beginning with Tony Abbott’s prime ministership in 2013, and ending with Labor’s return to power in 2022, this era was, according to Kelly, “a novel experiment” to “resuscitate Australian conservatism”.

But the Liberal Party’s confused flirtations with nationalism, Christian morality, anti-environmentalism, anti-migration, and marriage equality throughout this period undermined whatever cohesion and significance this “experiment” may have had.

Having three prime ministers in quick succession (Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, and Scott Morrison) with their own distinct, and at times incompatible, vision of conservatism did not help.

Nor did the timing of the Brexit referendum in 2015, and Donald Trump’s election in 2016, which injected global conservatism with right-wing populism, and threated similar transformations in Australia.

By the time of Anthony Albanese’s election in 2022, conservatism’s reputation in Australia had been dirtied, the word now at least partially associated with Trumpism, populism, and anti-democracy in many Australians’ minds.

But even if the “experiment” had been a miraculous success, and Trump and Brexit never occurred, the Liberal Party might still be running into significant problems today.

A recent discussion paper published by the Liberal Party has tried to diagnose what has gone wrong for the party, and how to reverse this downwards trend.

And it would seem much of the party’s problems are demographic.

As the paper notes in its opening chapter, Australians today are more multicultural and secular, and are less likely to have children, than they were in the 1940s when the Liberal Party was founded.

In 1947, only 9.8% of the country’s population were born overseas; by 2021, the figure was 29%. Over the same period, the proportion of Christians has dropped from 88% to 44&, and households with couples and children from 46% to 30%.

Choosing the 1940s as its comparison was knowingly selective. That decade was the lowest point for migration since the Europeans’ invasion in 1788; it was also the start of pent-up demand for family formation, delayed by the turbulence of World War II.

But the broad point of the paper remains true: the patterns, habits, and relationships of Australian society have changed remarkably in the 80 years since the Liberal Party’s founding.

At the last election, Millennials and Generation Z voters already comprised 47% of all voters.

This means that almost half of Australian voters cannot remember a time when the barrier to home-ownership was relatively low, when most Australians went to church on Sundays, and when toasting the Queen at public events was common practice.

Nor can they remember, for that matter, wage arbitration, protectionism, or militant unionism.

The end of these traditions and policies would have shocked older generations. In 1964, Donald Horne noted some of them were waning (monarchism, Christianity), but he did not predict the diminishment of unionism, protectionism, nor home-ownership. When he described Australia as “the first suburban nation”, he did so on the assumption that Australia was a “property-owning democracy”, not a nation of renters.

Even the Liberal Party’s more recent achievements, like the Howard Government years, is outside living memory for many Australians. The Liberal paper notes that at the next election, 19% of voters will have been born after the year 2000. They will have been at most seven years old when John Howard lost office.

Researcher Intifar Chowdhury has recently argued that this generational shift is seeing young Australians “increasingly abandoning both major parties, particularly the Coalition”.

Liberal Party officials have noticed this abandonment both at the polls and in their party membership: only 23% of voters under 40 years of age voted for the party at the last federal election, and the party’s membership is disproportionately older than the rest of the population.

And rather than getting more conservative as they age, as the old dictum goes, voters are sticking with centre-left and progressive candidates as they get older.

Using Australian Electoral Study data, Chowdhury has found that Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z voters (born between 1961 and 2004) are more likely to give their first preference to the Greens in the House of Representatives than to either Liberal or Labor.

Given many Greens voters will give their second or third preference to Labor, this finding won’t worry the ALP as much as it does the Liberal Party.

So why aren’t Australians voting more conservatively as they grow older?

Chowdhury suggests the problem is economic and structural. Conservative parties rely, naturally, on a broad base of conservatism throughout the voting public. With fewer home-owners and families among Millennials and Generation Z, younger Australians not only have less conservative interests than their predecessors, but many have come to resent the Liberals “because they defend the asset-owning class against the rest”.

If this is right, then the Liberal Party has a rocky road ahead of it. Any solution would have to involve reforming the country’s economic structures to allow young, progressive Australians to age into conservative over time. Given the Labor Party is leading the charge on lowering the barrier to home-ownership, it is possible that future conservatives might thank the ALP for their economic management, rather than the Liberals.

Liberal frontbencher Andrew Bragg was recently called on his party address this problem by leading an “economic revolution” and becoming the “radical centre”. Time will tell if this gets the Liberals out of their tailspin.

James Watson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Australia Institute.