Australia’s cultural and political divide between those under and over 50 has been illuminated by recent polling on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Suddenly it looks like a new Australia — young, educated, diverse, urban — is trumping an old Australia that is, well, none of those things.
It’s the starkest of contrasts: the post-Mabo generation shouting Yes! while the old Australia grumbles No.
It’s the clearest marker we’ve had that the new/old divide has worked its long way slowly through Australian culture — always the lead indicator of change — until all of a sudden it is flipping politics. The Voice is set to be the moment when that flip takes solid form and, thanks to Australia’s compulsory voting, begins to change how governments work.
Who looks like being last to the party? Why Australia’s traditional media, of course!
The Essential Media poll breaks attitudes to the Voice up by marketing generations. Zoomers (born after 1990) and millennials (born after 1980) are in favour of the Voice by an astonishing five to one. The interwar generation (over 77) and boomers (now 57 and up) are strongly (although not as strongly) against.
The Newspoll breaks it up into 15-year blocks. That quarter of Australian Electoral Commission enrolments that are over 65? Strongly against by 57% to 40%. The quarter who are under 35? In favour by a whopping 70% to 20%.
The rise of new Australia is not just a recycled story of the young looking to the future and the old hankering for the past. The new Australia that’s starting to flex its power is significantly different from the old, reshaped by half a century of big social changes.
Fifty and under is another way of saying people born after, say, December 5 1972, when the Whitlam revolution began turbocharging big social trends including a levelling up of education through needs-based funding, embraced multiculturalism in immigration with the practical end of the White Australia policy, enabling the construction of a truly Australian cultural industry and the beginnings of engagement with Indigenous self-determination.
Turns out that when you change the government, you really do change the nation. Now those changes have taken shape in under-50 Australians.
Born before 1972? You probably didn’t finish high school (only about a third did). Born after 1972? You almost certainly have the relevant Year 12 certificate (itself a more educationally dense offering than the previous leaving certificates) and probably have a university or other post-school qualification.
Non-British country of origin skews to the under-50s. The median age for Britain-born Australians is about 58. For India-born residents it’s 34, and for China-born 38. If you’re under 50, you are likely to be part of — or are immersed in — diverse communities.
Young, educated and diverse communities gather in cities, as close as they can. At last year’s election in the inner-city Green-voting seats of Melbourne and Brisbane, about two-thirds of the voting population were under 50. (Nationally, it was about half.)
Under-50s also grew up as Australian culture was reshaped by the Indigenous experience through contemporary music, visual arts and literature to television and film production. They’ve absorbed a different telling of our national history: the violence of frontier wars; the lie of terra nullius; the Stolen Generations; the discomfort of Australia Day.
It’s not just age. Plenty of over-50 Australians have embraced the new Australia (perhaps some of them Crikey readers). And there are pockets of under-50s who reach for the comfort of the old. But through education, migration and urbanisation, new Australia has reached the critical mass that turns its cultural dominance into political majorities.
News media should welcome the change. But they’re wedged. The simplicity of the journalistic style, the old assumptions about what makes news and how the world works, was designed for that older, more monocultural Australia.
Australia’s media was badly burnt around the turn of the century when the culture of the new challenged too soon and was crushed by the politics of the old — from the republic referendum to the Tampa crisis. It convinced journalists that the old-new balance was set, unchallengeable. They recognised the same pattern in the climate wars a decade later and the take-down of Bill Shorten’s tax reforms in 2019.
Now the media risk missing the moment the Voice referendum offers for politics to follow culture into the new Australia. Sometimes their scepticism about the odds of success reads as cynicism about the Voice campaign itself.
The Liberals and Nationals, too, are wedged between the old Voice-dubious Australian votes they have and the new Voice-enthusiast votes they need. They know that electorates with younger voting majorities lean toward progressive policies and parties. That’s why Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is trying to muddle through with vague hand-waving about “details”.
That vagueness faces an early test with new Australia. Of Victoria’s 39 electorates, 23 have an under-50 majority. The Liberals and Nationals hold just three. One of those? Alan Tudge’s recently vacated seat of Aston.
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