Young men are drifting to Dutton. Will their mothers vote with them?

When Anthony Albanese became prime minister of Australia, his official and unofficial advisers told him that the zeitgeist was with him. But the US election has marked a cultural about-face. “If this pattern were repeated here” must be the beating refrain of Albanese’s nightmares.

Diversity, equity and inclusion – DEI – has anagrammed its own demise. The march to the “right side of history” turned out just to be to the right. What was to be the social democratic century was transformed by a social media-led democracy.

The contest between Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton will take place in the shadow of Donald Trump.Credit: Marija Ercogovac

Young people, election analyses had shown, were moving to the left and not becoming more conservative as they got older. But now young men, according to a recent poll published in The Australian Financial Review, are drifting towards Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

This cohort played a noted part in securing the US election for Donald Trump, but they were also a canary in the electoral coalmine. In the final count, Trump’s young men were unexpectedly joined by voters whom the Democratic Party had counted in its corner: Trump grew his vote among Latinos and blacks and gained ground in counties with a high share of college graduates.

Despite the Democrats’ hopes of winning women on reproductive rights, Trump even brought in a higher share of the female vote than in 2020. That’s another script flipped, or at least curled a little at the corners. Because for a while now, it’s been young women who’ve seemed to lead voting trends.

Not only are young women trendmakers and setters, but they also have enormous powers of persuasion.

In a 2006 paper, economics professors Nattavudh Powdthavee and Andrew Oswald suggested that, as young women moved left, they were taking their fathers – who might previously have voted for a party on the right – along with them. “As men acquire female children,” they wrote, “they become more left wing.”

There was some evidence of this phenomenon in the 2022 Australian election, with men citing their daughters as a reason that they chose to vote teal. John Forbes, a company director who told the AFR he had voted Liberal “since birth”, shifted his vote and even campaigned to get teal candidate Sophie Scamps elected in Mackellar.

Meanwhile in Wentworth, another life-long Liberal voter, Ian Tresise, voted based on Allegra Spender’s renewable energy preference. “I have a daughter who works in energy policy,” he told the ABC. “That’s pretty compelling.” I don’t doubt she is.

There are a range of reasons that women might be increasingly voting left. As Mike Turner, director of the polling agency Freshwater, which showed young men turning towards Dutton, told the AFR, “young women are significantly more likely to prioritise government services”.

This is also the view of Powdthavee and Oswald, who note that women prefer more public goods and a higher tax rate on income. The reason, they argue in econ-wonkese, “is that their marginal utility from the first is relatively high” (that is, they benefit the most from public services) “and the tax penalty they face from the latter relatively low” (that is, women in general earn less, so are less concerned by the taxes which are levied to pay for the public services).

So all things remaining unequal (and I’ll leave the paradox to explain itself), the future will be female.

But here’s why Dutton’s appeal to young men could crash over Albanese’s head well before rising sea levels consume his new waterfront home. Powdthavee and Oswald found that there isn’t just a father-daughter effect in politics – there’s a corollary with mothers and sons, in which, so they say, “a mother with many sons becomes sympathetic to the ‘male’ case for lower taxes and a smaller supply of public goods”, thus “making her more right-wing”.

Fathers and daughters, mothers and sons – it’s so hopelessly cliched. But one thing is obvious: parents are sympathetic to the challenges their children encounter in life. Having a daughter can open a man’s eyes to the barriers that the patriarchy has historically placed in women’s way. And having a son can make a woman more attuned to the challenges young men are facing.

In 2012, two significant things happened in my life: Hanna Rosin published a book called The End of Men. And I had a son. Rosin’s book was originally an article in The Atlantic, in which she asked whether, after years of struggling towards gender equality, it was possible that the end point wouldn’t be equality at all. “What if,” Rosin proposed, “modern, post-industrial society is simply better suited to women?”

Boys aren’t just being left behind. They are also vilified and labelled toxic – especially by the left – for behaviours that used to be considered heroic. They are pathologised or medicated when they express their urges to wrestle and shout and run. They are increasingly treated like an imposition on society rather than a key part.

I grew up with the homily that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”. So empowering. But as I once cartooned for my classmates in our hormonal years, fish might still aspire to a life with wheels. Indeed, as poverty and child wellbeing statistics show us, children are usually happier and families more prosperous when the wheels stay on.

It’s not just mothers who see boys become vulnerable to predatory influencers such as Andrew Tate as they try to find self-worth in a society that foists hereditary blame on them for the patriarchal structures they had no part in erecting. Society is slowly – too slowly – realising that treating men as expendable leaves us all bereft.

In the circumstances, it’s no wonder that young men might start rethinking their generation’s general lean to the left.

I don’t know whether most young men are actively trying to influence their mothers to vote for Dutton. But will women – and mothers – vote for a future that finds room for men? It would seem extraordinary if at least a few didn’t.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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