'People underestimate how dire it is': Young Liberals reflect on a historic loss

SBS Australia

16-05-2025

As the Liberal Party grapples with the 2025 election loss, due in one part to a failure to engage young voters, we ask young Liberal supporters how they reflect on the party's campaign — and its future. Credit: Illustration by Caroline Huang Coming up to the 2025 federal election, there were several factors in the Liberal Party's favour. There was a global trend of young men shifting to the right, and a 2024 pattern of incumbent governments losing elections . Plus the party had employed the same social media agency that worked on former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison's 2019 successful election campaigns. And yet it still suffered a catastrophic loss. It was the first election in which gen Z and millennial voters made up a majority of the electorate (accounting for 47 per cent) and outnumbered the once-dominant baby boomer vote - but the party seemingly failed to harness the youth vote. Again. Electorates with higher shares of young people tended to favour the left, particularly Labor, according to early analysis done by ANU youth researcher Intifar Chowdhury.
"I think people underestimate how dire it is for us as a party," one anonymous Young Liberal who we'll call Alex told The Feed. "If at the next election again we see an even an worse result, is there even a Liberal Party left at that point?" Anthony Ma, vice president of the UNSW Liberal Club, noted that earlier in the year, the party had been quite confident in its chances of victory.
"Unfortunately, this did end up being the worst defeat in our party's history," he said. Lack of support from young voters is not an issue unique to the Liberal Party, with gen Z to abandon major parties altogether, and early research revealing the strongest predictor of a Greens or independent vote was the share of university-educated women who consistently voted against both major parties. The Feed asked four young Liberals based in the ACT, NSW and Queensland for their reflections on the campaign, and how they're feeling about the party's future. Each believes passionately in the party's stated beliefs of small government and individual freedom, and as part of the now-largest voting bloc in the country, young Liberals (and Young Liberal members) are arguably the future of the party. But will young people be listened to? "I think [the party] still treats young people as if it's the same as young people in the '60s or 80s," Alex said. "But it's not — it's fundamentally not."
None of the people The Feed spoke to were particularly surprised by Labor's win, but all were shocked by the scale of the Liberal loss, the worst in its 80-year existence. Twenty-year-old Eliza Kingston, who joined the Queensland Young Liberals out of high school, had watched David Crisafulli lead the LNP to victory in last year's Queensland state election. She was surprised by the federal election loss "because there were really excellent candidates for given electorates". "I think we just didn't articulate our arguments for [our policy solutions] sufficiently," she said. But some warning signs for the poor result were there in the party's own review of the 2022 election which highlighted that its two-party-preferred vote was the weakest among young women aged 18-34. And again in research done on the 2022 election by the conservative think tank The Centre for Independent Studies which found millennials were not growing conservative with age — and would not cross over to the Coalition "until their 80s" based on current trends — while Gen Z entered the electorate with historically low support for the Coalition that was also dropping "abruptly". And the Liberal Party policies may not adequately appeal to young people like those of the Greens and Labor, according to some in the party. The youngest new addition to the lower house, 30-year-old Liberal member for the Queensland seat of McPherson, Leon Rebello, told the ABC that "the issue that we have in the Australian political system is that the Greens and Labor appeal more because of what they promise." "If the Liberal Party get their policies right, they can appeal to young people. "But it's difficult as a political party to appeal from the youngest of voters to the oldest of voters."
Perhaps a concept dear to the Liberal Party was missed in 2025, according to Anthony and Jordan Abouzeid, vice president of the ACT Young Liberals, who each raised the idea that Menzies' "forgotten people" and Scott Morrison's " " are now young people. The 'forgotten people' date back to a 1942 speech by the then-prime minister Robert Menzies, and would form an ideological foundation for the Liberal Party. Back then, the forgotten people were the middle class; the people not rich enough to 'look after themselves', but nor needed to rely on the state. "Fundamentally the Liberal party stands for Menzies' forgotten people," Jordan said. "And I feel like at the moment, Menzies' forgotten people that we're not speaking to are young people. "Particularly young men."
Anthony from the UNSW Liberal Club elaborates that young people have a "white-hot anger" — they have gone to school and university, obtained full-time jobs, and yet are not able to share in the Australian dream. "They've got worse living standards than their own parents." He believes the country needs a course correction on housing for young people, "so they can finally have a stake in our country, so that they can have faith in capitalism." Late last year, Mission Australia's annual Youth Survey Report found that the major concern of young Australians had switched from climate change to cost of living. Anthony said that instead of focusing on the frustration of young people, the Liberal party had been "tinkering around the edges rather than going to the more fundamental issues." "Cost of living was consistently the biggest issue for voters in the campaign. Yet what we saw in the last two months was a sort of meandering," Anthony said.
"[The Liberal Party] had a lot of distractions like the Welcomes to Country and the whole ." Jordan believes young people are now trapped in a kind of "luxury poverty" — able to afford a watch or some nice clothes, "but when it comes to the things that really make life tick - when it comes to housing, when it comes to food, those things are becoming increasingly expensive and they're cutting them out," he explains.
"Our country has a great history of sheep shearing, but the feeling I got from speaking to young people and particularly young men, is that more so they're feeling like the sheep and not the shearer." He believes the party's policies were a hard sell to young people. "A 25 per cent cut in [the fuel tax] and access to more debt for housing — I think what a lot of young people want from housing policy isn't necessarily more debt." But while there have been ongoing accusations of ' ' for The Liberals, Eliza disagrees. "I think they are engaging young women enough," she told The Feed. "If we're talking within the party, we have a women's branch, we have a young Libs branch, and I think we have strong communities within the party ... I certainly have always felt highly supported within the party as a woman."
Perhaps what added to the party's inability to engage young voters was its refusal to engage with influencers and new media in what was dubbed by some as 'the influencer election'. While Anthony Albanese appeared with a long list of young influencers and new media brands that engage young audiences, including Abbie Chatfield and Ozzy Man, Peter Dutton's most notable appearance with a young content creator was an interview with Olympic diver Sam Fricker.
When a Daily Aus journalist asked Peter Dutton how he planned to reach younger voters, when he'd denied an interview request with the new media company that boasts an audience of more than half a million, he responded that the Coalition was the best party for young people because it was "the only party with a plan to achieve net zero by 2050" (Labor also had a policy to reach net zero by 2050, while the Greens' was to reach net zero by 2035). He also pointed to providing support to reach home ownership and help young Australians "and older Australians" with the 25 per cent cut to fuel excise. "The party had this approach of being really risk averse, being really professional, and it's clearly not worked," Alex told The Feed. "There has been a lack of bold policy that has moved towards both appealing young people and parts of the broader populace."
A missed opportunity, according to all the young Liberals we spoke to, was campaigning more on immigration, "which should be an easy vote winner for us" said Jordan. But also Australia's mounting debt, according to Jordan and Alex. Australia's debt is forecast to increase from $881.9 billion in 2024-25 to $1,136.3 billion in 2027-28, according to the Parliamentary Budget Office outlook - debt that young people will be paying off.
"As someone who wants to see this party succeed, I was feeling very despondent watching us 'me too' all of Labor's spending commitments," Jordan said. "I want to see balanced budgets, I want to see debt paid off. "But we are continuing to stick to a lot of high-spending policies that will result in the debt getting larger and larger, and eventually it's going to have to be young people like ourselves that pay that off."
As the party moves forward, the true test will be if change is put in place. Alex believes the party's healing process from 2022 was stunted by hesitation to discuss and critique. "Because of the culture within the Young Liberals, people weren't able to have a free and open debate about what is good policy; what we should have as policy in the party," he said. "And as a result, I don't think we have been able to learn the lessons that we should have." Despite the historic loss, the four are determined to see the party succeed. Some are eager for it to return to its core values, while all are confident in what the party can offer to new generations. "Even though we are perceived as a party of the old and the gentry and whatnot, we are the party of the aspirational," Anthony told The Feed.
Eliza believes it's playing the long game, and Alex feels that even if there is a long time in Opposition, "there will come a point where lessons will be learned." And with a deep passion for the Liberal Party, Jordan says talking to young people of all stripes has made him excited for the future. "They are ready for something new. They are ready for change," he said. "And I have a feeling they'll be successful in that." Just days after these conversations, when stepped in front of a press pack as the newly elected leader of the Opposition, she mentioned Menzies' forgotten people, and John Howard's 'battlers'. "They're also now the young professionals," she said in her speech. "The Liberal Party that I lead will always have these Australians, and their aspirations, front of mind." Time will tell if young Australians will see the prioritisation those 'forgotten people' once enjoyed. Watch now
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