A new report on voter habits has detailed a generational shift of young people away from conservative parties, but one expert says it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Generation Left: young voters deserting the right challenges the long-held belief that every generation becomes more conservative as they age.

In the report, Matthew Taylor, director of the intergenerational program at the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), offered conclusive data that voters born after 1981 haven’t voted for the Coalition, Australia’s two most conservative mainstream parties, in the same numbers as Gen X, Boomers and the Silent Generation as they become older.

However, Dr Liz Allen, a demographer and social researcher at Australian National University, disbelieves the notion of future generations ‘abandoning the right’, and says caution is needed when applying past behaviours to future trends.

She said the future-oriented analysis fails to take into account changes in the political parties, the policies they offer and the lived experience of the individual.

“As a demographer, it’s becoming ever more apparent that comparing generations and pigeonholing generations using arbitrary dates that fit nicely into Gen X, Gen Y or the millennials, it’s not helpful,” she said.

“This analysis is essentially a series of hypotheticals based on previous generations’ behaviours, and it is applying those assumptions of those observed hypotheticals from previous generations to future generations.”

She said this arbitrary definition can also cause “inter-generational warfare” and contribute to stereotypes.

The Greens won more votes with Gen Z at the 2022 election than the Coalition. Photo: AAP

What the report claims

“Among Millennials, the Coalition polled fewer primary votes than the Australian Greens (in 2022); a political party generally thought of as a minor party,” the report said.

The Coalition primary vote was, at 23.1 per cent, not greatly different among Gen Z with a third of this youngest generation voting for the Australian Greens.

The report states that by age 40, Boomers and Gen X – those born between 1946 and 1980 – voted for the Coalition at a far greater rate than Millennials are currently, and Gen Z is voting for the party at more than 20 per cent less than previous generations did at the same age.

Victorian Youth Parliament Premier Krushnahdevsinh Ravalji, 23, told The New Daily he believes “there is a change coming”.

“There is a societal change that is happening, and I also acknowledge my own upbringing as a migrant and living in Victoria which is a progressive state, I think that does influence a lot of young people’s opinions,” he said.

“In terms of the older and younger generations, the core values are very much the same, but I think they take different shapes and forms.”

Is the Coalition in trouble?

Media coverage of the report, however, has been definitive: The Coalition is in trouble.

“Coalition could lose 35 seats as Millennials, Gen Z reshape politics” The Sydney Morning Herald writes.

“Coalition faces slim chance of return to power unless it gets young voters on board, says report,” the ABC says.

Generation Left argues if the Coalition can’t win over young voters, who it states are already resisting the adage that people become more conservative with age, it risks being relegated to minor status and the Greens will become the opposition.

It projects that by 2040, Boomers will make up just 11.8 per cent of voters, about a third of their total contribution to the 2022 electorate.

In the same year, Gen Z will make up almost a quarter of all voters, and alongside the generations that will come after, will make 46.3 per cent, according to the report.

Combined with Millennials, this cohort will make up 69.8 per cent of all voters.

The report “does not provide an explanation as to why it is that Millennials have shown a greatly diminishing inclination to move to the right compared to previous generations, nor why it is that Gen Z has entered the electorate with such low levels of support for the Coalition that continue to fall”.

“What it does offer is a warning: Connecting with younger voters must be the centre right’s highest priority; to ignore such low levels of support among those born after 1980 is to risk never returning to power,” the report said.

“If the Coalition’s path back to power is thought to be paved by ‘doubling down’ on older voters and ignoring the young, it will prove a perilous one.”

Lived experiences

Would the Coalition have lost the 2022 federal election if the COVID-19 pandemic never happened, or if Scott Morrison had never taken his ill-fated holiday to Hawaii?

If a future Labor party leader is embroiled in a scandal on a level never seen before in Australian politics, would voters flock to the Coalition in response?

Dr Allen said there are many elements and factors that cannot be “captured in forward-looking analysis because it assumes people will continue to behave in the future as they have behaved in the past”.

“Who would have thought we’d have a pandemic? It is all these things that can occur. We have different circumstances with regard to the local and the global context that we operate in,” she said.

“While there is research that does indeed point to the fact we tend to grow more conservative with age, that alone is a contentious issue.”

It certainly doesn’t account for the shifting positions on the arbitrary left-right political scale.

Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating who said recent government decisions on foreign policy had left him politically homeless, offers an example of the shifting political lines between decades, leaders and policy.

“This isn’t left … it makes me and other former Labor MPs now look like Bolsheviks,” said Mr Keating during a speech to the National Press Club earlier this year.

Former PM Paul Keating challenged his party’s international policy during a fiery National Press Club speech. Photo: AAP

‘False sense of knowing’

Dr Allen said she can imagine a lot of politicians and political strategists will be excited by the analysis, but it isn’t their job to judge future voting trends.

“It’s to look beyond these sorts of things and understand what the needs of Australia are. It’s not about political survival,” she said.

“The experiences we go through in life can’t be easily defined by arbitrary definitions.”

International analysis has shown a similar trend of an unclear future.

An annual Morning Consult research poll showed the ebb and flow of American political alignment, with people identifying with the right declining during Donald Trump’s presidency, and less people identifying as being a liberal since Joe Biden entered the White House.

Dr Allen said we should be aware that data that includes peoples experiences and intentions can be more valuable than trying to judge future trends.

“Relying on a reductionist approach of considering people as numbers and assuming they’re going to behave as past generations have behaved gets us into a false sense of knowing,” Dr Allen said.

“When we get into that position, we show that we know nothing.”