Conservatives must ask: what’s it like to be a young adult today?

What does a conversation on cost of living look like to a 30-year-old single person trying to build a life for themselves?

Millennials, generations Y and Z represent the fallow ground conservatives have failed to cultivate and nurture. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella

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Since the Liberal Party got shoved fair up the Khyber at the May 3 election, there has been much soul-searching and reflection apparently. What of the female vote, what about families and new migrants? There is, however, a missing chunk of this conservative electoral post-mortem, and perhaps this is symptomatic in and of itself.

Nobody is talking about the kids.

When I say kids, I mean the millennials, Gen Y (aged 29 to 44), Gen Z (aged 13 to 28) and those even younger. Those who can vote are not voting conservative, and all the Liberals seem to be doing about it is whining.

A week out from my 52nd birthday, everyone’s a kid to me these days, and I mean that sincerely; with a tinge of wistfulness, if I’m honest. Case in point, I recently had to introduce some of the smart young people in my team to the cinematic glory that is the final dance scene from the 1984 classic Footloose, starring a young Kevin Bacon. The reaction? Hey, that guy dancing looks like Chris Minns!

A young Kevin Bacon with Lori Singer in the 1984 movie Footloose. Picture: Supplied

These are the generations the Liberal Party has lost and, from the best of my observation, seems to be clueless about how to engage.

I got thinking about it this past week when, in the course of preparing to move house (a horrible and thankless task), I saw hiding in my bookshelf a copy of Australia Tomorrow. It’s a book I, along with many others, contributed to four years ago, in which a collection of essays attempted to answer a very big question: What can a future Australia look like under a conservative banner?

As I reacquainted myself with my words from that time, I confess to feeling momentarily like a minor prophet. I wrote about a lack of vision and generations lost.

“Challenged externally and from within, searching for meaningful identity in an environment that doesn’t reflect or accommodate the ways of old. We’ve spent the past decade lurching along, fighting within ourselves. Struggling to be the signal above the noise. Grappling with how to preserve the fundamental strengths of our values system, while being able to adapt and grow in pace with the changing expectations of communities we seek to serve.”

Those words are as true today as when I wrote them. What’s more, four years down the track, the Liberal Party doesn’t appear to have worked anything out, especially from a policy perspective.

This is the conservative parties’ stirring (it’s no longer sleeping) giant.

At the May election, I struggled to understand what I was actually voting for.

Imagine being in your 20s, looking at the Coalition as an option – the policy cupboard was bare.

From time to time you hear conservative party elders talk about wanting young blood in the ranks. I don’t know if that’s true. What I think they really want are younger versions of themselves to simply do their bidding. Do things the way they’ve always been done.

We talk a lot about the Howard legacy, which is right as it set a so-far unmatched benchmark in Australia, but it’s important to remember that the generations conservatives need to win over grew up in a different version of Australia, see things through a different cultural and social lens.

Simple examples: their mothers never had to fight for the right to work, after marriage, as mine did; they haven’t experienced a recession or proper financial downturn; from a geopolitical perspective, they weren’t alive when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 – I was 16 and “studying” in Italy when it happened. It was mesmerising.

Neither were many in this generation alive when those planes flew into the World Trade Centre twin towers in New York in 2001. I was a television journalist in my mid-20s living in Perth, and I watched it happen live on TV. It took me quite a few years to get on a plane again without throwing up from nerves.

These seismic moments in our narrative don’t register for the generations that have never known loss, deprivation or anything resembling existential threat.

They have different and significant challenges that reflect their generations, many of which have been dismissed. Is it any wonder so many have moved from flirting with socialism to getting hitched?

This cohort doesn’t look at conservative politics and see compassion, good governance or a political bent that has a long history of leading social justice and change.

That’s right, globally it was conservative politicians who led the abolition of slavery in Britain and the US. It was conservative politicians who brought the first Indigenous Australian into federal cabinet.

Where are these values when they have never been more important? We have lost our way.

The challenge is making the same liberal, conservative values that served Australia so powerfully under the likes John Howard and, yes, Robert Menzies relevant to a new generation and reflective of Australia today.

Former prime minister John Howard, whose values need to be made relevant to a new generation of voters. Picture: Damian Shaw/NewsWire

Newsflash: Australia has changed. What it means to be a conservative has changed as those of us who are conservatives change. I see that not only in younger generations but in my own paradigm.

It is critical to be able to answer basic challenges with substance. What does a conversation on the cost of living look like to a 30-year-old single person trying to build a life for themselves? Maybe they’re working part-time in one job and toughing it out in the gig economy after-hours. Maybe their partner is doing the same thing.

What does a conversation about smaller government look and sound like? Why should a 25-year-old care about this?

How well do we understand what the next generation of voters needs to have the freedom to build the life of their choosing and understand the role that conservative values play in delivering that?

For 22 years next month (told you, I’m getting old) I have employed and continue to employ a cohort of bright young people who mostly fall into the centre or centre right of politics. They are smart, ambitious, driven, engaged. They have a clear vision for the Australia they want to see thrive. They can articulate it.

I think the other weakness is that conservatives continue to frame everything through the lens of the past and obsess about some imaginary voter base. Australian elections have always been won in the middle. The only base I fundamentally believe in is a pizza base. Gluten-free, please.

I say all of this without any political ambition whatsoever. I’m a lifelong conservative voter, a business owner. A writer, of sorts. A holder of opinions. A pretty good listener to the world around me and the people in it. I’ve been looking at the party I’ve voted for all my life and waiting for it to catch up and figure out that Australia has changed and respond with intelligence and empathy.

Millennials, generations Y and Z, they are the fallow ground conservatives have failed to cultivate and nurture; provided no hope or vision for a future. Ironic, isn’t it? So many pride themselves on being politically savvy but can’t discern the times we’re in.

I’m going to steal another line from my chapter in that book: If the dream alone is simply to govern, to hold power, it is a bankrupt dream indeed. And if a people perish for a lack of vision, the same can be said of governments, of political movements, a hundred times over. There is a conservative doom spiral at play among some voices; I don’t buy it or buy into it. There is always hope and now is the time for action.