The Liberal party needs to reconsider negative gearing, reshape housing policies and to overhaul its process of selecting candidates if it wants to attract young voters, according to the newly resigned Victorian MP Matt Bach.
The 40-year-old, a moderate who shocked colleagues when he announced he was quitting state politics to move to the UK with his young family, says the Coalition has an opportunity to win over Millennials and Gen Z voters struggling to enter the housing market.
“One doesn’t want to piss people off needlessly, that’s not good politics. But we need to call a spade a spade,” Bach told Guardian Australia, prior to his departure.
“The vast majority of people who are perhaps a bit older than me have a mortgage and are trucking along. [But they have] younger people in their lives, children and grandchildren who they care deeply about, who are facing some of the most inflated housing and rental prices in the world.”
He said data showed young people were less likely than those before them to become conservative and blamed this on a lack of housing security.
“It’s the old adage – you don’t vote conservative if you don’t have something to conserve,” Bach said.
He said the state’s first-homeowner subsidies should be scrapped to stop them inflating prices, and encouraged inner-city development and increased density. The latter, he admits, is covered in the Labor government’s much-spruiked housing statement, though he has “serious doubts” that the loosening planning approvals alone would guarantee more homes.
Bach said there was a role for federal parties to tackle the housing crisis, including via a review of negative gearing.
“The federal government should review a whole series of measures including that one in order to check the impact,” he said.
He pointed to a recent parliamentary inquiry into the crisis, of which he was a member, that recommended a review of negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions.
’We’ve got some good people coming in’ to the party
With little fanfare, Bach contacted the governor to formally resign on Thursday, and left he left the country with wife, Amy, and their two daughters the following day.
Once considered a future party leader, he insisted the decision to move overseas and return to teaching was the result of an “early midlife crisis” – not because he doubted the Liberal’s prospects at winning government in 2026.
Bach hasn’t been afraid to ruffle feathers on his way out.
One Liberal MP used a recent party room meeting to criticise Bach’s contribution to parliament last month, in which he urged the Liberals to ignore “selfish, rich geriatrics” who he said “protect their own wealth at the expense of younger people and new migrants”.
In an opinion piece for Guardian Australia, Bach said he wanted to “blow up” youth prisons and residential care, and he has also been vocal in his support of cannabis reform, describing the current system as “fundamentally illiberal”.
“If someone found me smoking a joint out the back of parliament, I’d get a slap on the wrist and pay a fine that in comparison to my income is quite tiny,” Bach said.
“Yet every single year in Victoria we actually lock up hundreds of poor and vulnerable people in prison, thereby completely destroying their lives, because they’ve chosen to use drugs.”
Bach was also at the centre of a battle within the Liberal party earlier this year, when MPs voted to expel Moira Deeming from the party room, in a drawn-out process that began when she attended an anti-trans rally in March that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.
Deeming is now suing the opposition leader, John Pesutto, for defamation.
Bach wouldn’t comment on the legal action.
He said more work was happening behind the scenes to ensure “better candidate selection” come 2026.
“John’s focused on the right things, we’ve got some good people coming in,” he said, pointing to Nicole Werner, recently elected to the lower house seat of Warrandyte, and Richard Welsh, who takes Bach’s position in the upper house.
On his decision to wear the Liberal pride badge at several press conferences during the saga, Bach said: “I knew that given the nature of some of the commentary at that time, there were friends of mine and members of that branch who were hurting.”
“In that very small way, publicly, I could just do something to make sure they were aware that I was with them.”
One regret, however, was his push to “shelve” the government’s flagship Suburban Rail Loop project during the election. Bach admits the election promise to divert the $34.5bn for stage one of the project into the health system, did not go down well with voters.
“The difficulty is that by the next election, [the premier] Jacinta Allan will have started doing what she loves doing more than anything in the world and that is to dig a hole … she has said at some point this year, she’ll start signing contracts.
“So then, that’s it, right? We will have to honour it.”
