Since its historic defeat at the last federal election, the Liberal party has been engaged in a frenetic search for its internal compass. What’s transpired has been less a course correction and more a series of sharp, haphazard turns: appointing its first ever female leader, walking away from net zero, reopening tensions with the Nationals, purging said female leader, and now pivoting towards One Nation voters with a hardline stance on immigration. If there’s a single unifying theme, it’s chaos.
Angus Taylor has declared his new shadow ministry will improve living standards and “protect” Australia’s way of life. But if you look at the voting trends from the last federal election, the Liberal party remains deeply out of step with modern Australia. And the Coalition is not doing well to mend relations with women and younger voters.
Let’s start with age. The Australian Election Study revealed a continued decline in support for the two major parties, with the Coalition suffering the brunt of that shift, securing just 32% of first‑preference votes overall. Among voters under 40, that figure fell to 23%. And among millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) it was just 21%, down from 38% less than a decade earlier.
This matters because millennials and gen Z are a growing voter block who now make up 42% of the electorate.
What is especially confronting for the Liberal party is that these cohorts are not ageing into conservatism. Millennials are now in their 30s and 40s, navigating mortgages, childcare costs and insecure work. If ever there were a moment for a centre‑right party to reconnect, this would be it. Instead, Coalition support among millennials has fallen steadily across four elections. In 2025, Labor won 64% of the two‑party preferred vote among those voters.
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The data on gen Z (born after 1996) tells a similar story. While their support for the Coalition (28%) is marginally higher than millennials’, it remains well below the national average. Labor won gen Z by an extraordinary 67–33 two‑party margin, the strongest of any generation. These voters are not driven by nostalgia or culture wars. They are economically anxious, socially progressive and acutely focused on cost of living and housing. Immigration‑heavy messaging does not map neatly on to their lived experience of multicultural Australia.
Then there is gender. Australia has now firmly shifted from the traditional to the modern gender gap in voting. In 2025, 37% of men voted for the Coalition, compared with just 28% of women – a nine‑point gap that has widened steadily over the past decade. Over the past 12 years alone, women’s support for the Coalition has fallen by 19 percentage points.
Against this backdrop, leadership decisions take on symbolic weight. The removal of Sussan Ley reinforces perceptions that many women already hold – that it’s a party of men. After the election, 56% of Labor MPs and senators were women, compared with just 31% in the Coalition. That could decline further after the Farrer byelection. Leadership spills and factional purges that disproportionately remove senior women risk amplifying distrust, particularly among younger educated female voters who are already drifting away.
To be clear, voters are not primarily motivated by personalities. Policy still matters most. In 2025, 56% of voters said policy issues were their main consideration followed by parties as a whole (21%), local candidates (12%) and party leaders (11%). Immigration was a concern – about 6% named it their top issue – but it remains a second‑tier issue electorally, concentrated largely among Coalition and minor‑party voters. For the majority, cost of living absolutely dominated. Two‑thirds of voters named an economic issue as their top concern, and this pressure was felt most acutely among younger voters and renters. An analysis of the 2022 election shows that among cost‑of‑living‑focused voters under 45, women were heavily over-represented (70%), reflecting the gendered impact of housing costs, insecure work and unequal caring responsibilities.
Here lies the Coalition’s most serious problem: its longstanding advantage on economic management has collapsed. For the first time since the Australian Election Study began in 1987, Labor was preferred over the Coalition on nine out of 10 policy areas in 2025, including cost of living, housing and even taxation. For a centre‑right party, this is an existential blow.
The party has turned to immigration politics to address economic grievances and stem leakage to One Nation. But if migration becomes the organising narrative of economic renewal, it risks functioning as a proxy for frustration and does little to answer harder questions about productivity, skills, infrastructure and long‑term growth.
If the Liberal party wants to survive into the future it must build an economic narrative that offers hope rather than grievance: one that is different to Labor and one that does not shadow One Nation.
Moving further to the right might give it a boost in the polls, but it is likely to be damaging in the long termby shrinking its base and pushing women and young voters further out of reach.
Dr Intifar Chowdhury is a youth researcher and a lecturer in government at Flinders University
