They’ve been dismissed as ‘beta males and pathetic women’. But this Young Lib is punching back

Georgia Lowden, 24, is the outgoing president of the NSW Young Liberals. I spoke to her on Thursday.

Fitz: Georgia, thank you for your time. I have been fascinated by the recently leaked scathing submission your organisation sent to the Liberal Party’s 2025 election review being led by Nick Minchin and Pru Goward. I was stunned by how strong it was, and want to get to it.

GL: Good.

Fitz: Meantime though, some recent polling had it that just 19 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds voted Liberal last election. That is squarely your demographic, and it means less than one in five of your generation are voting your way. So I want to know, what took you into the Liberal Party?

GL: Sure. I got quite engaged in politics around the age of 15, and I worked out that I believe in Liberal values of individual and economic freedom; equal opportunity for effort; aspiration; personal responsibility. And quite simply, I believe in the power of people and not governments to drive progress. Yes, the Liberal Party has a bit of an image problem when it comes to young people and women. And I thought, as a young woman, I wanted to be part of the change that I want to see.

Fitz: Do you despair right now at how grim things are electorally?

GL: I wouldn’t say I “despair”. I obviously see huge challenges, but I also see huge opportunity for the party if we’re willing to listen, modernise and be bold. Obviously, the Young Liberals are very motivated to help drive that change from within, and I am quite optimistic about what I’ve been hearing from Sussan Ley since she became leader – that the party needs to change and to listen to modern Australia and, frankly, just be more relevant.

Fitz: I have posted online myself that what the Liberal Party most desperately needs right now is fewer Young Liberals and more young liberals. You sound to me like you are both.

GL: Yes.

Fitz: Are there too many old white men running the show who don’t get that the world has changed?

GL: Not so much in NSW, where 40 per cent of our federal MPs are women [four in total]. And at the state level, 45 per cent are women and there are 10 MPs under the age of 40. Obviously, people are more likely to vote for a party that looks like a country that it seeks to represent. But nationally, yes.

Fitz: Do you believe in quotas for women?

GL: Yes. Support for the Liberal Party among women has been declining since 1996 and the proportion of women Liberal MPs in our federal party has also declined over the time. This has been an issue for a long time. So I do see quotas as a very important temporary method to help level the playing field while we do more work to address the underlying barriers preventing more women from succeeding in our party.

Fitz: OK, so you’re young and progressive. So honestly – honestly – did you tear your hair out when a couple of weeks ago you saw Matt Canavan and Barnaby Joyce do the whole “let’s abandon net zero” stunt?

GL: [Long pause.] Well, it can obviously be difficult at times being in a Coalition with the National Party. And I do understand why some National MPs aren’t as enthusiastic about climate action as our metropolitan MPs are. But I do despair that if we don’t take action on climate change, that we will quite simply never win government again. Voters take this issue seriously, and we do need clear, credible commitments on climate change that give industry certainty and that also resonate with younger voters.

Fitz: What other policies do the Libs need to get their lifeblood back and lift your demographic up from 19 points?

GL: We obviously need to talk a lot more about the housing crisis and reform – slash red tape, get construction costs down, boost housing supply. We need to be courageous, look at negative gearing and look at other reforms.

Fitz: Do the NSW Young Liberals want to abandon negative gearing?

GL: No, not abandon it. I think most people do see it as important in terms of just preserving the rental market. And all of us young ones rent. Ultimately, I’m sure if my landlord wasn’t able to negative gear, my apartment wouldn’t be here for me to rent. But I think a lot of us do support imposing caps on it.

I do despair that if we don’t take action on climate change, that we will quite simply never win government again.

Georgia Lowden

Fitz: OK, let’s go specifically to these scathing submissions that the NSW Young Liberals made to the 2025 electoral review, which were leaked this week. It’s time to come out from behind the curtain and say, “Yep, that was me!”

GL: [Laughing.] It wasn’t all me. I was very supportive of the efforts of a small team that put it together. And I was very encouraging for them to be as honest as they wanted to be.

Fitz: One of your criticisms was that Peter Dutton was way too prone to go on Sky After Dark, while ignoring more traditional media outlets, and that was electoral suicide. Do you agree with that broad position?

GL: Do I agree that him appearing too much on Sky News is what killed us?

Fitz: Do you agree that one of the things that killed the Libs was them caring too much about what old white men are saying on Sky After Dark, as it is neither here nor there, and the mob is not watching it anyway?

GL: I think the more we engage in culture wars, the less Australians think we’re talking about the issues that actually touch their lives. The Liberal Party is fundamentally supposed to be a party about strong economics and middle Australia. So naturally, when you’re talking about divisive cultural issues, they’re not the problems that we should be talking about. We should be talking to middle Australia and focusing on issues like housing, cost of living, energy, etc. And I think one of the good things that Sussan Ley has done since becoming leader has been appearing at the National Press Club. Peter Dutton didn’t appear there, and while I understand that there’s obviously a comfort in appearing on a platform where the viewership agree with you, he needed to be reaching more Australians on platforms out of his comfort zone, talking to a broader range of media outlets, with a broad range of viewers.

Fitz: Your submission was very critical of Dutton and Ted O’Brien’s nuclear plan. Can you expand on that?

GL: It was totally against the Liberal values of letting the market work it out, right? I do believe nuclear should be an option in the energy mix. But why should be on the taxpayer to prop it up?

Fitz: Was the decision to oppose Labor’s tax cuts crazy?

GL: It wasn’t their brightest idea.

Fitz: What about Coalition policies to cut 40,000 public service jobs?

GL: Not good.

Fitz: Peter Dutton’s refusal to stand before the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island flags?

GL: See my previous comments on culture war issues.

Fitz: Given that you may well be the future of your party – and please don’t reply if you don’t want to, but I’m just interested – did you vote for the Voice?

GL: I didn’t. But the reason why I personally didn’t is because I don’t believe centralised government works. And I thought long and hard about how I would vote, and ultimately the reason why I voted no was not that it would be the voice of division, but just more bureaucracy, and we would throw money at it, and it wouldn’t actually solve the issues.

Fitz: And yet Peter Dutton’s position went from seeming tacit agreement to give the Voice bipartisan support, to holding a referendum on constitutional recognition of the Aboriginal people, to his final position which was scaling back Welcome to Country and getting rid of Aboriginal flags. I mean, right now, the Liberal Party doesn’t seem to have much of a policy at all to help Indigenous Australians. Is that fair?

GL: Well, going into the election, I think that would be fair to say. But not now, when all policies are under review, and one good thing that Sussan Ley’s done already is to have gone out and visited Indigenous communities, listening, talking and hearing ideas.

Fitz: Back to your submission. You were critical of Mr Dutton’s emphasis on cracking down on “woke culture” in schools and elsewhere. Did that do a lot of damage?

GL: Yes, because the more we’re talking about these symbolic problems, the more we’re just disconnecting from Australians who really, at the end of the day, don’t care about these problems. They’re caring about how they’re going to afford to pay their energy bills, get food on the table, or buy a home one day. These are the issues that we should be talking about.

Fitz: Surely the key issue for the Liberal Party right now, the one everyone is talking about, is whether to go right or left. It is obvious you can’t stay where you are. There are loud voices on the likes of Sky News that say push right, push Trumpian. And there are people like you who say you’ve got to move towards the centre. Do you feel like if you lose the argument, you’re done here, that there’s nowhere further to go [and the Libs will just fade away]?

GL: Yeah. We simply need to stick to our core values of individual and economic freedom, and support people to build their lives the way they please. There is a broad range of views on culture war issues in our party – and that’s because they’re not core to our party’s foundations. What works in the US doesn’t work here, and that’s a good thing because it means Australia is less polarised. I believe Liberal values are the values of middle Australia. Demonstrating those values is what has seen us win elections, and renewing them is what will help us rebuild.

Fitz: You and the Young Libs have been bitterly criticised for the stance you’ve taken?

GL: I think Rowan Dean and Rita Panahi called us “Beta males and pathetic women,” which is lovely.

Fitz: This is on that late-night Sky show … what’s it called? You know, the barking mad show, where they howl at the moon?

GL: I honestly don’t even know because I didn’t watch it live. It was sent to me as a tweet.

Fitz: So you’re the president of the NSW Young Libs, and you don’t watch that Sky After Dark stuff from one year to the next?

GL: No, I do not.

Fitz: What about your fellow Young Liberals? Do they watch it?

GL: I’m sure some do, but mostly only if they’re living at their parents’ place. We’re definitely not spouting Sky talking points, right?

Fitz: Do you care about such criticism?

GL: No, I don’t. They can say all they want, but they need to hear what we’re saying, and they need to keep being told that the Liberal Party is not going to win elections by moving further to the right and appealing to an increasingly narrow group of Australians.

Fitz: There is some hope after all! I suspect many readers will be wishing you well, and, though I am sure you don’t care, I do, too.

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