Federal election 2022: Battle for Australia’s young and restless

Coalition MP Trevor Evans needs to appeal to some of the nation’s youngest and most progressively minded voters to pull off a retain his marginal seat of Brisbane.

Couple Andrea Lawton and Alex Nicolaidis, both aged 28, live and work in Australia's youngest electorate – Brisbane. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Two-term Coalition MP Trevor Evans needs to appeal to some of the youngest and most progressively minded voters in the country to pull off a win in his marginal seat of Brisbane that might just save Scott Morrison at the coming federal election.

Mr Evans, 40, is alone on his side of politics in holding a namesake capital-city seat.

Sydney has long been a Labor prize, secure with frontbencher Tanya Plibersek, Greens leader Adam Bandt has a lock on Melbourne while the divisions of Adelaide and Perth are both with the ALP.

If that is not daunting enough, Mr Evans was one of only two Queensland Coalition MPs who shed votes in Mr Morrison’s 2019 win, now holding Brisbane on a 5 per cent margin.

Brisbane has Australia’s highest percentage of voters under 30, at 25 per cent, and has emerged as one of a handful of winnable seats for Labor in the Coalition’s Queensland fortress.

Victory is achievable for Labor, which held Brisbane for 30 years before the LNP’s Teresa Gam­baro won in 2010, launching a decade of success for the ­Coalition in the inner-city seat.

Engineers Andrea Lawton and Alex Nicolaidis, both 28, live and work in Brisbane which takes in wealthy conservative-leaning suburbs of Ascot and Hamilton and trendy Newstead and Paddington.

The couple both preferenced Liberal at the last election but Ms Lawton said she was leaning ­towards voting Greens.

\Trevor Evans. Picture: Bradley Cooper

“I like their climate policies and also their plan to reduce student debt and make higher education free,” she said. “I think a lot of young people are still undecided. I haven’t seen very much about what Liberal or Labor are promising yet.”

Mr Nicolaidis said he would probably vote Liberal again, but was also undecided. “The way the world is at the moment, a change of government is probably not the best thing,” he said. “I think we could do with some stability.”

The Greens secured 22.4 per cent of the primary vote at the 2019 election, just behind Labor’s 24.5 per cent, meaning Mr Evans, a moderate Liberal, will face questions about the government’s track record on the environment.

He pointed to the Coalition’s new national waste laws and plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 in declaring he had “been able to deliver strong outcomes for Brisbane residents”.

“I just don’t think that would be matched by a less experienced candidate on the backbench who may be more focused on activism than achieving results,” Mr Evans said.

Labor’s Madonna Jarrett and the Greens’ Stephen Bates said young voters wanted bolder plans to address climate change. Ms Jarrett, a businesswoman, said Labor would build the economy around renewables. “Scott Morrison’s government can’t even agree that climate change is real,” she said.

Mr Bates, a sales assistant, believed neither major party could be trusted on climate change if they continued to take political donations from coal and gas companies. “When I first started to campaign, I wasn’t sure how often climate would come up, but it is overwhelmingly the first issue people raise with me,” the 29-year-old said.

Griffith University political analyst Paul Williams said the fight for Brisbane would be lineball. “We automatically assume people in the city are leftie types, but Brisbane shows that is not ­always the case,” he said.