Liberalism: A message of hope

policy that captures the entrepreneurial spirit of young people and taps into the human instinct for freedom and aspiration is the key to steering millennials and gen z towards liberalism. by Freya Leach.

The following is a transcript of remarks at the Sydney Institute event: The Liberal Party: What is to be done?

Mainland Australia has wall-to-wall Labor governments. Things feel different already. The Opera House was not lit up for the King’s Coronation. Landmark stamp duty reforms to get more young people into home ownership are being wound back in NSW. And race is now at the centre of today’s most significant national debate. The effects of a left-wing Labor government are certainly being felt in NSW and across Australia.

However, at the outset, it is important to recognise we have been here before. Thank goodness for the Internet because I was only 5 years old at the time, but by 2007, Labor had won a fourth term in NSW and Queensland, a third term in Victoria and WA, and Kevin Rudd had ousted the venerable John Howard. There was not a single Liberal government in the country.

We have been in our current position before. History shows we will re-emerge from the political wilderness, but the Liberals will not return to government by being complacent, nor will we win by complaining about ourselves. We need to present a renewed vision for the nation, one that takes the lessons of the past, the ever-present values of our party and adapts to the context of today.

Before we plot out a path for the Coalition out of opposition, we need to start by understanding where we are.

Federally we lost the urban and female voters. At a state level, we lost young people.

The contrast in state and federal results shows that women and urbanites will still vote for us if we offer compelling policies, like universal pre-k, stamp duty or gambling reform, and if we address things like the environment and women’s issues.

Young people pose a far greater threat to the Liberal Party.

The adage that people get more conservative as they get older seems to be breaking down. When Millennials began voting, 36% supported the Coalition, now it’s just 25%. Just one in four people under 40 voted for the Liberal Party in the Federal election.

The critical problem is that this cohort of people - or my generation - is only growing in its political power. In 2011, those born before 1964 made up 53% of the voting-age population, now they are just 38%. Conversely, Millennials and Gen Z now account for 36% of voters, up from just 17.9% in 2011. In key seats like Parramatta where we suffered double-digit swings, Millennials made up almost half the voting-age population.

To answer the question of “what is to be done” about the Liberal Party, we must first decipher why Millennials and Gen Z have deserted the Coalition at such an alarming rate.

One explanation is that no one under 35 has been in the workforce during a recession. This new bloc of voters has known, for the last decade - or their whole adult life - an average unemployment rate of 5.4%, inflation at 2.3%, and interest rates of just 1.5%. We have the luxury of not needing to vote on economic lines, the irony being we are beneficiaries of reforms implemented by the very Party we reject.

We must reframe our message to cut through in a digital world and meet young people where they are at. That means looking at new platforms like TikTok, collaborating with influencers and building digital infrastructure.

But social media is a sphere that is currently dominated by the Left. FriendlyJordies is an influencer and entertainer. He has been paid by the ACTU since 2016 to create pro-Labor content. He has been so successful that he has amassed over 211 million views on YouTube and has millions of followers across Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.

The other challenge is we can’t just give young people spin or easy Party lines. Young people see through that. One of the most successful podcasts is run by Joe Rogan, each episode is over 3 hours long. My generation wants substantive content.

But the deeper challenge we must confront is that it’s not just the Liberal Party that’s out of style; young people have been captured by anti-Liberal ideas. This is the biggest challenge we face. It can’t be solved by spending more money on Facebook ads or recruiting more ethnically diverse women to our Party’s ranks, even though both of those things would help.

Ultimately, Liberalism is predicated on two core ideas; freedom and aspiration. For young people both of these are under attack.

Freedom means independence from the arbitrary coercion of another. Coercion eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and thus makes them a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.

For young people, this concept of freedom that our Party rests on has been distorted.

Economically, from a person’s first paycheck, freedom is robbed. At a minimum, 10.5% of one’s wage is carved out and stored in the coffers of big super funds. Mediocre financiers are professionals in slicing and dicing other people’s money just to clip a little for themselves while delivering barely more than the market returns an individual would expect if they just invested their money themselves. The breach of freedom becomes even more difficult for young people because that hard-earned money should be put towards a first home instead.

The cultural forces pushing against freedom are even more profound. On the one hand, there’s an insistence by young people that distinctions associated with inherited culture, be that differences between sexes, classes, religions or lifestyles, should be rejected in the interests of equality. On the other hand, people are being reduced to those very things that the left claimed meant nothing. The new left is trying to resurrect the class war that Menzies crusaded against by defining people in terms of immutable personal attributes.

The female uprising against Scott Morrison stemmed from his portrayal as a straight white male, out of touch with minorities, and misogynistic towards women. The truth was irrelevant. He was a straight, white male. For Millennials and Gen Z, that was enough. Reducing people to their physical attributes is a coercion of the individual by the mob. For young people, it leaves us feeling like we are chained and confined to our arbitrary inherited identity.

The new form of identity politics that young people are immersed in gives rise to a culture of victimhood where we look for not what we can offer to our nation, but what our government can give to us.

The natural result is a politics of envy, where the role of the government is to redistribute the wealth of the privileged few to the masses of victims.

This is fundamentally at odds with the Liberal vision of Australia. While the Left is the politics of envy, Liberalism is the politics of aspiration.

We need to call young people, my generation, to a higher and better way of living. One where we seek to give not to take. We all know that it is the struggles of life, for existence and progress, that bring out the best in people and leads to a nation defined by its fierce independence of spirit, matched with brave responsibility. Out of this struggle, grows a people of strength and endurance.

But taking on this mantle of responsibility requires young people to be aspirational and not resign themselves to a state of victimhood. That means young people must strive for something higher than themselves.

It begins with striving after home ownership. By the age of 30, just 35% of people Millennials own their own home. This has fallen from around 65% for baby boomers. We need to rekindle aspiration by increasing the housing supply and letting young people use their own money, currently locked up in superannuation, to buy their first home.

Nearly 60 per cent of first-home buyers receive an average of $100,000 from their parents. If home ownership is dependent on your parent’s wealth, and your parent’s wealth is tied to their home ownership, Australia risks creating a society of hereditary privilege and a class of landed gentry. This is killing aspiration.

This is not to say that home ownership shouldn’t be difficult to achieve. In his forgotten people speeches, Sir Menzies argues that home ownership is the concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving. The struggle to attain one’s home is what creates the instinct of responsibility and pride it confers on its owners. But young people must be encouraged to take this road of frugality and feel as though it is possible for them to buy a home. The simple reality is that at the moment, supply is not matching demand, making homeownership feel like a pointless aspiration.

We can spend all the money we want on social media and find the best candidates in the country, but young people will not vote for us if the values that we stand for; freedom and aspiration, are alien concepts to them.

But as conservatives, we believe that human nature does not change. As I engage with my peers, I see bright spots where freedom and aspiration still inspire people. For example, 60% of young people want to be entrepreneurs, and we’ve witnessed the rise of the side hustle where people start multiple small businesses. The Liberal Party needs to capture the entrepreneurial spirit of Gen Z and Millennials and use it as a way to steer young people towards liberalism.

Ultimately, Liberalism is a message of hope for young people. To give them renewed faith in their capacity for freedom and aspiration is a good thing. For the Liberal Party to recover, we need to generate policy that taps into the core pillars of Liberalism and the human instinct for freedom and aspiration. We also need to articulate why the Liberal or Menzian vision for Australia offers a higher and better way of living for young people. Only then will the Liberal Party re-capture the votes of Millennials and Gen Z that are necessary for our Party’s future electoral success.

This quote by Sir Robert Menzies is as true of the Liberal Party today as it was when he said it: “We have suffered far too much from people who have no political convictions beyond a more or less genteel adherence to our side of politics. That kind of adherence is worthless. We must have people who believe things, and who are prepared to go out and struggle to make their beliefs universal.” As Liberals, we need to define what Liberal values actually are, then we must go out and prosecute the case. Only through these values can we hope to build a nation that inspires us more and a government that disappoints us less. This is the way forward for the Liberal Party.

Freya Leach is a 20-year-old research fellow at the Menzies Research Centre. She was the Liberal candidate for Balmain at the recent NSW state election.