Young voters and women have left the Coalition – and they aren’t being tempted back

Apart from being malevolent and stupid, Pauline Hanson’s burqa-in-the-Senate stunt this week was old material.

Hanson lacked the imagination to come up with a new way to senselessly offend Muslim-Australians, so she reprised the clownish display she first made in 2017, and strode across the Senate floor in a black burqa.

She was suspended from the Senate for seven days, which is fine with her – she didn’t show up for work during the previous sitting period in parliament because she was busy sunning herself with Donald Trump and a crew of far-right nasties at the US president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

It’s unclear what the people of Queensland, whom she nominally represents, stood to gain from her trip, which she abandoned her Senate duties to take.

(This is perhaps a good moment to remind ourselves that Hanson draws an annual taxpayer-funded salary of $340,000.)

As Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek told ABC radio, the burqa stunt was “simply a guarantee that some schoolgirl wearing a headscarf’s going to get bullied on the train on the way to school today”.

Hanson perhaps wanted to capitalise on her moment in the sun.

As widely reported, One Nation is enjoying a surge in the polls.

The populist party received 6.4 per cent of first preference votes at the last election, but a recent Redbridge poll showed its support at 18 per cent.

The Herald/Age’s Resolve Political Monitor poll, published in September, showed One Nation’s support at 12 per cent.

For comparison, the Greens’ share of the first preference vote at the last election was 12.2 per cent.

Conservative elements of the Coalition seem to have interpreted this bump for One Nation as evidence they need to tack further to the right.

It provides great political cover to do so, although it makes little rational sense.

One Nation has never won in its own right a seat in the lower house, where the government is formed.

As former Labor staffer Lidija Ivanovski pointed out this week in The Australian Financial Review, of the 10 metropolitan seats Labor won from the Liberals at this year’s election, “eight of those returned results for One Nation that were well below their national vote”.

That’s where the Coalition’s eye needs to be trained.

But the marked increase in One Nation support tells us something important about voter sentiment at this moment.

By contrast, the Australian Election Study, released this week, provided some long-term insight into where voters are moving over time.

The study, a joint exercise between the Australian National University and Griffith University, is the gold-standard independent source of information on voter attitudes and behaviour in the country. It has tracked them since 1987.

This year’s study, analysing the results of the May election, found that overall, trust in government is low – just 32 per cent – but stable since the last election. Satisfaction with democracy (70 per cent) has also remained stable since the 2022 election.

There is a huge and continuing move towards non-partisanship.

In 2010, 14 per cent of Australians were non-partisans; now it is 25 per cent. They have overtaken Liberal partisans, who comprise 21 per cent of voters.

This splintering of loyalties is happening all over the democratic world, but in other countries without compulsory voting, non-partisans would probably stay home on election day.

In Australia, where everyone eligible is compelled to vote, the trend has benefited independents and minor parties, who claimed about a third of first preference votes at the last election.

Interestingly, while independent voters overall are not particularly distrustful of politics or politicians, One Nation voters are “by far the least trusting of politicians”, according to the study, with 74 per cent of the One Nation voters surveyed believing that politicians “look after themselves”.

“This is perhaps to be expected from a party with populist tendencies and style, but also a potential challenge for the party if they want to become a mainstream parliamentary presence,” the study authors note.

Hanson doesn’t seem to have any interest in moving to the mainstream, but the conservative politicians who look wistfully in her direction should.

The 2025 election study reserves its most pungent message for these politicians.

Apart from the disintegration of loyalty for the two main parties, there is another trend that is only hardening over time: the increased progressivism of women and young people.

“Whereas voter behaviour used to be driven to a large degree by social class,” the study authors note, “newer cleavages have emerged including generation and gender.”

This phenomenon is observable in other democracies, too, but in Australia, the Coalition is really getting walloped by it: only 28 per cent of female voters put the Coalition as their first preference at the last election, the lowest ever.

The voting gender gap began in Australia in the 1990s, which is the last time the Coalition did better with women than it did with men voters.

But it has gaped wide in the past decade, sometimes to a 10-point difference.

In the past, women were more likely to vote conservative, but researchers believe that increased secularisation, higher education and greater workforce participation have moved them to the left.

The other big narrative is the progressivism of younger voters.

The fall in Coalition support at the last election was “disproportionately concentrated” among younger voters, with just 23 per cent of under-40s voting Coalition.

Of course, young people have always been more likely to vote left, and over time, they have generally gravitated more towards conservative parties.

But the problem (for the Coalition) is that Australian Millennials (those born from 1981 to 1996) in particular are defying this “conservative maturation” theory.

In other words, the Coalition can no longer rely on this voter cohort ageing into voting conservative.

And at the 2028 election, the youngest voters, Millennials and Gen Z, together with the oldest members of Gen Alpha, will be close to constituting a majority of the electorate.

As the study points out, “the current levels and trajectories of party support … point to Labor dominating federal politics for the foreseeable future”.

This is bad news for democracy, and grim reading for the opposition.

Although I wonder if any Coalition members have even glanced at the study’s findings.

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