100% this. Young people are done with the major parties.
For too long, Australia’s policymakers have treated market liberalisation and technocratic caution as articles of faith rather than policies to be tested against evidence.
The assumption was that freer markets with incremental tweaks would make us richer. In practice, the gains were highly concentrated, risks were ignored, and the costs were dumped on people with the least political power.
Take our complacency about domestic capability. Offshoring manufacturing and hollowing out energy security only made sense in a world of stable geopolitics and benign trading partners.
The pandemic should have killed that illusion. So should the moment China – our largest trading partner – effectively shut down large parts of our export relationship at will, sparing iron ore only because it needed it.
Or take migration policy. Australia embraced a model deeply comfortable with importing cheap unskilled labour while doing far too little to manage the consequences for wages, infrastructure, rents and house prices.
Then there are the semi-marketised sectors that now define much of the modern Australian economy. Childcare, the NDIS, vocational education – we have built systems that are neither properly public nor properly competitive; they are unproductive taxpayer-funded markets riddled with perverse incentives where the main winners are the intermediaries who clip the ticket, and the losers are the future generations footing the bill.
This is not a story of one bad government. It is the cumulative consequence of an unimaginative political class. Too timid to confront entrenched interests. Too managerial to rethink old assumptions. And too frightened of creating any immediate losers in the pursuit of reform that might produce large long-term gains.
I remember sitting in high school economics class, hearing about Australia’s overreliance on income taxes and its weak non-mining business investment. That was fifteen years ago. We are still having the same conversation.
But now these weaknesses are being exposed by recurring global shocks. We still have not clawed back the 6 per cent fall in real wages since the 2022 inflation shock. And despite the treasurer’s assurances, we are entering this next challenging period in a weak state. We are unproductive and growing almost exclusively through government largesse and immigration.
Young Australians, especially, are economically vulnerable. They are more likely to be renters, more likely to be in insecure work, and for the lucky few who own their homes, many entered the housing market with small deposits, helped along by bipartisan home guarantee schemes – leaving them dangerously exposed if the predicted rate rises come to pass this year.
This is the same cohort hit hard by COVID-19. Young people drew the short straw when they were asked to sacrifice some of the best years of their lives – their education; the start of their careers; their relationships; travel; normal social development – largely to protect older generations nearer the end of theirs.
All they received in thanks were eye-watering rents, the Australian dream falling further out of grasp and an enormous intergenerational transfer of wealth from the young to the old.
So even if we avoid the worst of another energy shock, the deeper problem will remain: a growing number of young Australians no longer believe the existing model has anything to offer them. They did what they were told – studied hard, found work, tried to build stable lives – and still face stagnant wages, unaffordable housing and a diminishing sense that normal milestones like family formation are within reach.
This is why many Gen-Z and millennial voters are embracing parties once dismissed as fringe. One Nation and the Greens may be seen as ideological opposites, but both draw strength from the same perception: they mean what they say, and neither is captive to the market orthodoxies that still constrain the centre. They speak plainly about the country’s problems and promise real change, in a political culture where caution has too often been mistaken for competence.
The greatest risk for the major parties is not overreach, but the assumption that incremental gestures can restore confidence in a model that works for fewer and fewer people.
Australia needs an abrupt economic course correction that puts housing, family formation, productive investment and national resilience at the forefront. This means making tough choices when it comes to tax reform, immigration, economic sovereignty and budget sustainability.
And in turn, governments must be willing to impose losses on the people and sectors that have profited from our malaise.
Cathal Leslie is a Paris-based economist and former Productivity Commission employee