In the recent federal election, as in the past few elections, the mainstream media’s predictions and analysis of the results were far from the truth.
Andrew Bolt, a famous news commentator, went so far as to say on a Sky TV program that “the voters were wrong” in analyzing the results that night. Such comments show that mainstream society has no idea what Australians think about politics these days. From the results of the federal election, we can see that the Liberal Party and the Green Party, compared to the Labor Party, have even less understanding of the current generation of Australians. The loss of the Liberal Party and the stagnation of the Greens reflect that their policies are not recognized and accepted by today’s Australians.
Attitudes of the Young Generation
Every election is a reflection of the voters’ response to the society at that time and the future development of Australia. The Guardian reported that young voters said they never watched TV news or newspapers, and their knowledge of political parties nly came from TikTok or social media platforms. It is through these unsourced and uncredited channels that they cast their vote on the future direction of Australia’s governance. It is clear that Australians are exercising their democratic right to choose their government, but not necessarily making their choice responsibly.
With information on the internet unregulated and susceptible to manipulation by corporations, extremist political organizations or regimes intent on monitoring national ideology, many people today are effectively living in a world shielded from them by social media platforms. In such a climate, it has become a great challenge for democracies to break the information shield.
Analysis shows that voters who support the Liberal Party are mostly older and less educated. Among the younger generation, less than 30% of them recognized the Liberal Party. This result made the future of the Liberal Party look bleak. The orientation of the younger generation has also led to a drastic decrease in the number of young people joining the Liberal Party as members. How to win the recognition of the next generation again should be the first problem for the Liberal Party leaders to solve. Robert Menzies, the founding leader of the Liberal Party in the 1940s, was not only a politician, but also a spiritual leader of the youth of that time through the media. That generation of Menzies’ supporters made him Prime Minister of Australia for 17 years. Today’s politicians are rarely in touch with the younger generation. It is no wonder that the combined vote share of the two major political parties is now less than 70%, which shows that both the government and opposition parties are out of touch with the new generation.
Women’s political awakening
Federal legislation in 1902 gave both men and women the right to vote and to stand for election, but it was not until 1943 that the Commonwealth Government saw the election of Dorothy Tangney as the first female Labor senator and Enid Lyons as a member of the House of Representatives for the United Australia Party. 1966 saw the first woman to serve as a Commonwealth minister, Annabelle Rankin of the Liberal Party, and the first woman to serve as a federal minister, Julia Rankin in 2010. Annabelle Rankin of the Liberal Party was the first woman to become a federal minister in 1966, and Julia Gillard was the first woman Prime Minister in 2010. Until 2010, less than 30% of MPs were women, and the Liberal Party has always had a low proportion of women MPs.
There are many reasons why women’s participation in politics has been low, not necessarily because political parties are discriminating against women, but more likely because society and culture are hindering women’s participation in politics. Therefore, political parties need to take the initiative to solve these obstacles, so that women can have more room in Australian politics.
In the 2022 parliamentary election, the election of six female Teal MPs, all of whom were Liberal Party supporters, signals that women will not find it easy to become Liberal Party candidates and will have to look for alternatives. In the last decade or so, the Labor Party has established a quota system for female candidates, and the number of female MPs has increased dramatically. At the same time, encouraging women to participate in politics has also made the Labor Party more popular and supported by female voters. Of course, a male-centered political party will easily neglect women’s rights in its policies, which is also a challenge for the Liberal Party.
Emphasis on environmental awareness
Since 1992, the Green Party was founded by a coalition of national environmental organizations, and has gained a voice in the Australian political system. Today, the Greens have a support rate of about 12% in the Federal Parliamentary Election, making it the third largest political party in Australia. This level of support has enabled the Greens to gain a very high level of voice in the Senate and to bargain with the ruling party over the administration of the country, even though the Greens have only obtained a small number of seats in the House of Representatives.
However, the platform proposed by the Green Party is driven by ideology, but its implementation has to rely on a great deal of social resources. In the 2025 election, few Australians would be talking about the Greens’ platform in the face of a huge increase in the cost of living, and the Greens’ vote share had not changed much. “The Greens were not going to be able to link environmental protection with improving people’s livelihoods when life became more difficult for Australians, and it is safe to say that the Greens will be limited in the foreseeable future.
Former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett said after the federal election that if the Greens continued to talk about ideological changes and failed to respond to the needs of the people, they would follow in the footsteps of the Australian Democratic Party, which was once the third largest party supported by Australians, and disappeared from the Australian political scene.
As the world is expected to enter a period of instability and economic hardship, whether the Green Party can adjust its policies to be more relevant to the needs of the people is a matter of great concern to its leaders.
Integration of multicultural immigrants
The proliferation of marginal seats in federal elections over the past 20 years has shown that there are fewer and fewer supporters loyal to traditional political parties such as Labor and the Coalition. These marginalized voters may be young people who have little contact with society, women who are seeking more attention from society, or people who have given up their support because they feel that the two major parties do not have any good ideas. However, in the past 20 to 30 years, a group of multicultural Australians who immigrated from different parts of the world to settle in Australia and who have little knowledge of democratic government have not been able to fully integrate into the Australian society and culture, which also makes them have their own set of considerations in exercising their right to vote.
For many immigrants from poor countries, the Labor Party’s policy of protecting social welfare is extremely attractive to them. Moreover, Labor’s emphasis on fairness and changing the inequality of life for the disadvantaged has made many new immigrants inclined to support the Labor Party. Relatively speaking, the Labor Party was also more proactive in reaching out to the immigrant community, and allocated funds to support the development of a multicultural society and help immigrants integrate into the community. It can be said that many immigrants are more likely to support the Labor Party from the perspective of its basic philosophy and that of the Liberal Party.
However, there are many people who start their own business or small business in Australian society. Many immigrants will choose to start their own business, and some of them think that the Labor Party will levy more taxes to promote welfare policies when it is in power, so they are inclined to support the Liberal Party, which aims at a small government. Therefore, the rebuilding of the Liberal Party should start from helping immigrants to integrate into the society.
However, in the 2025 election, the Liberal Party considered the housing, cost of living, economic and employment problems faced by the Australian society today to be caused by too many immigrants, and proposed a drastic reduction of immigration. This kind of divisive policy, which seeks to win national recognition by reducing immigration, is obviously opposed by the immigrant community. The voting result did not show that Australians have increased their support for the Liberal Party, but it showed that the Liberal Party’s vote share in communities with more immigrants has dropped significantly, indicating that the Liberal Party has lost the recognition of the migrant communities. It is believed that the Liberal Party will have to change course in order to regain the support of these multicultural voters who are so influential in the overall picture.
Conclusion
At the beginning, I mentioned that Andrew Bolt was wrong about the Australian electorate, which is illogical. Voting results should be a reflection of voters’ preferences and choices, and rarely a matter of moral right or wrong. What is wrong must be the failure of political parties to understand, care about, and address the issues that voters value, or in this case the misjudgment of the Liberal Leader of what was acceptable to voters in this election.
It is time for Australia’s political parties to face up to the changes in the society and respond by proposing a direction that suits the development of today’s Australian society, in order to establish an effective government to manage this country that Australians love.
Mr. Raymond Chow, Publisher of Sameway Magazine