How the Coalition 'failed' young voters

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As the Liberals lick their wounds and Labor gets to work following its landslide victory, one underestimated group was instrumental in the result on election night.

Young people, Gen Z and millennials, were the largest voting cohort in this election, taking the mantle from the baby boomers for the first time.

Not rusted on, not party-aligned, young voters tend to cast their ballots based on issues and policies.

And in this election, they rejected chaos and uncertainty, instead, embracing what they clearly saw as more of a stable and certain future.

Welcome to Politics Now.

Hi, I'm Patricia Carvelis.

And I'm Claudia Long.

And I'm Tom Crowley.

A double header today.

Woo!

Three heads.

A hydra.

Yes,

that's what we're doing.

Now, as the politics now pre-eminent youth correspondents, I'm eager to break down the message young voters sent or received and then sent back in this election and how the broad consensus is that the Liberals failed to respond to to the needs of young people.

And the Liberals are saying that themselves.

They're in a bit of a world of hurt right now.

They're having an analysis about how they failed to connect.

So let's go to that, right?

Claudia, quick takes.

How did you see it?

I think they had real trouble, particularly connecting with young women.

The Liberal Party over the past decade have had trouble connecting with women of all ages.

You know, we've seen that time and time again.

Women have liked the party less and less actually since 2004, but that's taken a particularly sharp turn in the last few years i think that they may have mistaken having a good social media presence you know with lots of memes lots of stuff targeting young folks on tick tock on on instar as perhaps doing the work for them because it got a lot of engagement i think they've perhaps underestimated that actually a lot of young people are not disengaged necessarily.

They might be busy.

They're busy working.

They're busy, you know, trying to get on with life like anyone of any age demographic.

But that doesn't mean that they don't care about what someone's actually offering them and I think with younger voters we've seen the problem that the Liberals have had and across the board really which is that people really didn't seem to like what they stood for or really get a sense of what they stood for in any meaningful way.

I mean we know too that younger women, millennials and Gen Zs, do skew more left-leaning than previous generations.

And young men do skew slightly more right, but Australia is very different to America in that regard.

So over time, most Australian men tend to align, self-identifiers align with the centre.

And young women over the past about decade or so, if you look at the Australian election study, which tracks these things, have skewed more and more centre-left and then left.

And I think that shows that this is a long-term problem that's then culminated in what we've seen on Saturday Night PK.

What do you reckon, Tom?

Yeah, I think there's an economic story.

I mean, I would say that, wouldn't I, not to sound like a broken record on this, but you know, I think, and this is true of young and old and left and right, I think that there's sometimes been a bit of overestimating in this election in particular of how social attitudes map onto votes.

I think one of the big mistakes that the Liberals made, and this is, I guess, a little bit of a tangent, was thinking that people who voted no in the voice referendum in these safe outer suburban Labor seats were just going to vote for them in a federal election.

And, you know, you might survey them and they might say local crime, for example, another one of the kind of social attitudes, issues that might align with the Liberal Party, might be important to people, didn't really seem to be important in their vote when there was a material question on the line about standard of living and cost of living in combination with that Labor was able to talk about health and all the rest.

I think there's a real truth in that for young voters as well.

I thought the really telling moment in the campaign was when Peter Dutton belled the cat and said, oh, you know, young voters, do they like us?

Well, as they get older and a bit more serious and start thinking about their mortgage, they'll come to us eventually.

And that has historically been true.

For example, in the sort of Howard era, as people got older, they got into the house, they shifted to the Liberal Party.

I think what Labor's been able to do really effectively over the last decade or so is figure out that it can own aspiration for a generation of people as they go from young to not quite so young, as they move from their 20s into their 30s, start to think about a family, start to think about trying to, you know, find a house and settle down.

Labor looked at the modern couple and said, all right, a combination of parental leave, cheaper childcare, cheaper health care will take take a bit off your hex debt, will make it easier for you to get a deposit for your home.

That in combination, those things were actually a pretty appealing package that a young family would look at and maybe chuck tax cuts in there as well and think, well, labor is the one I'm not necessarily going to go to the right as I get older, but yeah, I am thinking more about my mortgage and my finances.

And I'm looking at labor that's packaging up an offer that makes sense for me.

And I think that's something the Liberals neglect.

They just kind of assumed that it would happen automatically.

I think they've got a lot of work to do to think about what their aspirational pitch is to someone who, like Claudia and I, is on the cusp of 30 and starting to think about that, that transition into working life.

There's a lot of discussion about the pre-selection of candidates, which I think is key.

Of course, it matters.

But it is actually about the policy development to Claudia, right?

Like, I think sometimes the answer, I've heard a lot in the last couple of days, it's about our communication.

We didn't get enough into sort of, you know, people's podcasts or that approach or, you know, we need to look at some of our candidate selection.

But it's got to be about the policies.

I mean, if you look at some of their fundamental decisions around policies, obviously working from home was one of the most fundamental.

But the other one for sure, Claudia, was education.

I mean, they painted that 20% hex reduction as elitist, which was...

fascinating in a country where we do have actually compared to lots of other countries high rates of people that we try and get into higher education.

Yeah, and I think this is like you were saying, PK, like this is a classic thing where it's not just down to one thing.

It really is a perfect storm of so many things going really wrong.

And you're absolutely right.

One of them is this hex situation.

I mean, to be honest, the main thing at least that I was hearing from Peter Dutton, and I think a lot of students were probably hearing from him around universities, was actually talking about international students and the housing market.

They really didn't talk about students

or

universities or or TAFE or education very much outside of that.

So Tom and I were actually in,

was it Maitland, wasn't it, when we were at Hunter Trade College?

And I think they went there a few times and that was sort of the times where we were seeing them talk to young folks who were entering trades, but it really just didn't cut through in the same way that a 20% hex debt cut just does.

And it's a really easy policy to communicate.

It's easy to put on an Instagram tile.

It's easy to get in a grab because it's really, you know, pretty simple as a concept.

Whereas I think the Liberals didn't really, and the Nationals didn't really have a good comeback to that and instead, like you say, try to paint it as something that's elitist.

And I think one thing that we saw a fair bit of was, you know, in response to that line from the coalition of saying, well, this isn't fair because not everyone gets it.

But there were also quite a few people, I think, in the community who were saying, well, I might not get it, but I'm happy for other people.

to get it.

And then I think, you know, we also saw these attempts from the coalition where Peter Dutton was wheeling out his son Harry, who, not to be too unkind about it, but kind of looked like he was in a bit of a hostage situation, to be perfectly honest.

I mean, Tom was there on the campaign when that was happening.

And I think that looked a bit desperate, to be perfectly honest.

I think it didn't really work in the way that they intended, particularly when Peter Dutton said that he'd be helping his son buy a house.

Because I think a lot of people found that frustrating because it taps into issues around, you know, people getting help from their parents and who can and can't do that.

um and I think that that was also one of the key issues PK in terms of the policy not only did they not really have a whole lot there to appeal to people who are under 35 but also they just really weren't very good at communicating it yeah I mean I think there's there's fertile ground for them to gain here right is the other side of this coin I think you look at housing when it comes to kind of like property developing and private industry there is some some natural kind of ideological alignment with where the Liberal Party could go that it would have something more interesting to say about housing.

I think income tax is a big one and tax settings generally, the way that they interact with the transfer system.

There are still a lot of issues for people who are part-time, thinking about going back into full-time work, who face really significant kind of tax and effective tax barriers because payments get withdrawn.

There are a lot of kind of financial issues there.

You know, the broader tax reform question about the reliance that we have on personal income tax and bracket creep.

These are things the Liberal Party historically has liked talking about that align with its kind of ideological outlook.

There's a real opportunity for Labor now with the enormous amounts of political capital we think it has going into this government to really consolidate its equity.

I kind of hate the term brand equity in politics, but you know what I mean, to intrude on some of the things that have traditionally been liberal areas and maybe pull off some reforms and own them.

But if they don't do that, I think there are opportunities for the Liberal Party to find a way to speak in economic terms to this cohort.

I think they've recognised, and you had it from Bridget McKenzie last night, PK talking about the tonal shift that they need in the way that they engage in social attitudes.

And I guess too much talking to the base and not enough talking to Middle Australia.

That's basically what Jason Wood, I think, told Raph Epstein earlier in the week as well.

So there's a social and presentational shift that they need to make, but I think there are opportunities in a policy sense for them to think about.

Okay, so we're recording this on a Tuesday.

There is a fierce attempt to find a deal and the numbers for three competing candidates.

Susan Lee, there is Angus Taylor, there is Dan Teehan.

Now, one of them will emerge.

There's a big, big attempt by certain moderates.

There's quite a lot of them, actually, who want to block Angus Taylor, who say he's the architect of a lot of these problems that happened in the campaign, including, you know, essentially the Liberal Party going to an election saying, we're going to increase your taxes, which is really you know wild when we think about it was wild at the time it was wilder in the result because clearly people thought that was rather strange i've got to be uh

i'm just going to say what i see when i see these people and i i think they're all um i know them all but we're not talking generational change are we claudia no not really and to be perfectly honest i think it's it

It's not an ideal situation for them.

And I think they're sort of in a position now where they almost need to pick their Brendan Nelson, right?

So that was who took over, you know, in case people's memories don't extend that far back, which is understandable.

We've all had a big weekend.

Brendan Nelson was the leader who took over after John Howard, after John Howard lost the 2007 election, the one where he also lost his own seat, much like Peter Dutton did over the weekend.

And he was really a placeholder leader, basically.

He's the sort of person who kind of mops up a bit of the damage, is just there to kind of, you know, keep things on track for a while before you pick the person who you really want to take you to the next election now i think from this group you know there's a there's a few i guess key issues here you mentioned one of them pk which is that angus taylor was so closely linked to what the coalition took to this election.

Now, so is Susan Lear.

She was a deputy leader.

But I think, like you say, particularly on those issues around tax, that's a problem.

I think Dan Teehan is probably somebody who doesn't really have a lot of recognition within the wider electorate.

I mean, somebody, Warren Edge, I believe, yesterday, was the one who described him as, what's his name?

Yeah, Dan Tehan,

basically.

And so I think there's a few issues there.

And then Susan Lee would make sense as a deputy leader to then move into that role.

But then, of course, you have the perception of the glass cliff, which is the cousin of the glass ceiling for women in the workplace, where you either hit the glass ceiling and don't keep progressing, or when things have gone wrong and are really crashing, you bring in a woman to fix it all up, and then she ends up bearing the brunt of that.

And that's the glass cliff.

So I think whichever direction they go in, it's not going to be ideal or perfect, but they're going to have to pick one of them.

Well they are unless someone else comes through the middle.

There was one millennial that was in the mix,

Tom, and that's Andrew Hastie, who is the shadow defence minister or was.

Obviously there's going to be changes.

He actually got a swing to him in the seat of Canning, but he's actually withdrawn from the race.

Although I've spoken to people who said, you know, they were prepared to vote for him.

So he actually probably would have done better than I think maybe is anticipated.

But

why has he withdrawn?

I mean, as far as I can see, he's smart and he knows the person who takes this job is not the person who's ever going to become Prime Minister.

I think that's exactly right.

And that's probably the attitude that a lot of the younger ones in the caucus have.

They'll see this as an opportunity.

I mean, just about everyone will get into this shadow front bench.

Anyone who's even kind of got a snowball's chance of becoming leader at some point will have a chance in a much reduced party room to strut their stuff, try and build a little bit of, you know, personality recognition, et cetera, and then maybe think about a tilt ahead of the next election or the one after.

But I think it's hard to separate all of this for the Liberal Party from

the

general picture of cities versus rural areas as well, because there is a natural age gap there.

A lot of young people just tend to live in cities and rural areas are older.

The Liberal Party has essentially now been

reduced to a mostly, very much outer urban or regional party along with the Nats as the rural party.

They've really been banished from major cities.

And at the same time, and I think not coincidentally, then a lot of moderate candidates have lost within the party.

And that factional balance, it's not to say again that there aren't young people who could be wooed by a genuine cultural conservative like an Andrew Hasty.

It may be that they could, but I think that the balance in the party room as they weigh these options up.

Charlotte Mortlock, who's prominent both in terms of promoting women in the party and also moderates, has basically been dismayed this week having pushed within the party to pre-select a bunch of younger, moderate liberal women to speak to exactly this cohort who then, I think she said, were forced to sell a proverbial sandwich and ended up losing and didn't have a great time.

How do you encourage people to stick around in the party?

These sorts of losses, if you're not careful, can have a momentum of their own and push you further away from the group of voters that you lost.

I think there's sort of hope for the Liberal Party looking at seats like Koo Yong, Goldstein, they might even win, you know, how close they were in some of those teal seats, that it's not totally out of reach that some of these seats could come back to them at some point.

But that existential question, I think, overlaps with this question of youth.

So then we want to look at the parliament more broadly and the sort of successes and losses.

The Greens story is just so interesting.

Despite their strong presence, I mean, they were kind of owning social media in many ways, successful courting of influences like Abby Chatfield.

While the party has had its strongest vote, and it will hold the balance of power in the Senate, so it's a strong pathway.

If the government wants to get things done, the Greens are there in the Senate with the numbers.

But that didn't translate into lower house seats.

The Greenslide in Queensland has gone, well, backwards.

And even Adam Bant, who's the leader, looks very likely to lose his seat, Tom.

I mean, that's an extraordinary story.

What's happened?

It is an extraordinary story.

It's a complicated story for the Greens because you look nationally and their primary vote hasn't really gone anywhere.

As you say, they are now in a position pretty consistently where they basically own one Senate spot in every state every time.

That gives them, I think it's now 11 because of Lydia Thorpe, but ultimately, you know, sort of 12 as their baseline in the Senate.

So it makes them a consistent balance of power, adjacent force there.

I think the way to frame this for the Greens, though, is a sense of kind of plateauing and stagnation.

I know that the Greens are pointing to the fact that they held on to their vote nationally as a way of saying, well, this wasn't such a bad loss.

It is worth saying both Max Chandler-Mather and Adam Bant actually did.

They were the two who did go backwards on their primary.

I think there's something interesting about that given how...

prominent those two are.

That's right.

A few reasons.

I just want to say, like, there was a redistribution of the seat of Melbourne.

It's taken in booths like South Yarra.

So it has changed as an electorate a little.

That does make a bit of a difference, doesn't it?

But yeah, absolutely does.

But

I think the question for the Greens, you know, I mean, look, every political party tries to spin you to an extent and will be very positive and bullish about their chances heading into an election sometimes.

The Greens do it a lot.

And especially 18 months ago, I think they were looking at a map of sort of 10 to 12 seats and feeling really excited about being able to kind of not only consolidate their gains, but essentially make themselves the party of the young inner city and start to own, you know, when Plibersek and Albanese retire the seats of Sydney and Graynler.

They were looking at Adelaide, they were looking at Perth, they were looking at Canberra, they were looking at Wills and Cooper and McNamara on the sort of outskirts of Melbourne, feeling excited about Fraser.

Basically, everywhere there was a collection of young people in inner cities, their aspiration has been to become the natural choice for that group.

It doesn't really look like it's happening.

And I think to have gone nowhere at all and then actually lost some of those seats, which the nature of three-quarter contests, they're such razor-thin margins.

Maybe you could argue they were even a bit lucky to fall over the line in all three of them last time and then a little bit unlucky maybe to lose all three of them this time in something that really is to do with the two-party contest.

But that question of where they can grow to, I think, is really difficult.

The party recognised, again, I think that they needed to have an economic narrative to sell to young Australians, and they started talking a lot more about housing and material circumstances than they had in the past.

I'm not sure the message really landed, though, whether it was just sort of a bit too big and they couldn't wrangle it into something that was really tangible and spoke to particularly people who were aspiring to get into home ownership.

I think they made a deliberate choice to speak to people who considered themselves to be perennial renters.

In a sense though, that even the rent freeze is kind of working within a crisis that is frozen in place.

Not to say the Greens weren't talking about the structural issues in the housing market either, but their key offering was kind of, you know, stemming the bleeding in a sense while you're a renter.

I think that the question for them about how they can sell that kind of story about the life that you are selling to a young person who lives in the inner city and how politics can change that for them is an important question for them to grapple with.

Claudia?

Yeah, I think, because I've just, I've got actually some of these figures in front of me at the moment, too, because I was looking through, I think Tom and I have a favourite website in common, which is the Australian Bureau of Statistics Census Quick Stats.

And I went back through it and it breaks it down into federal electorates.

Now, like you say, PK, the seat of Melbourne has changed since the last census and that has changed the population.

But in 2021, there were 95,300 people 34 and under in the voting population in that electorate and they outnumbered people 35 and over who were voting.

There's 80,000 of them roughly.

So Adam Band at the last election, 49.6% of first preference vote, almost enough to win the seat.

on first preferences alone.

So close.

This time, that has dropped down to 41% of the vote.

Now, that maybe doesn't sound like too big of a drop.

It's pretty substantial, though.

But he's gone from 47,883 first preference votes to 29,907.

Now, we were talking before that counting is still ongoing.

We don't know exactly who's won here yet.

But I think we've seen the Greens and their leader, Adam Bant, in the last few days saying, well, look, a lot of this is because Liberal preferences have...

flowed to the Labour Party and they're electing Labor candidates because of that.

I think in Melbourne, it's pretty clear that people have chosen to not vote for the Greens specifically.

Whatever reason might have driven that, that's unclear, whether that's to do with redistribution and people having different priorities, whether it's to do with, I think, some of the Greens' stances on things.

I mean, it's been really interesting.

We've been out and about in Melbourne over the past couple of weeks and also in Melbourne's inner north in the seat of Wills.

And one of the things that voters mentioned to us, people that you would think, you know, would vote for the Greens, they said they had very left-leaning values, that they supported things like dental and Medicare, but they found the Greens obstructive, obstructive, whether it was on housing, whether they were calling back even as far as the CPRS, the carbon price reduction scheme.

Sorry if I've gotten the acronym wrong there, PK.

CPRS, yep, no, no, you're right.

That the Greens blocked decades ago.

And this idea that the Greens are obstructive, that they don't know how to negotiate, that they're unstable.

And I think Adam Band has really borne the brunt of that, even though the Greens are not.

You are right.

This is an area I know really well.

And there are two factors that built up, And I've heard it anecdotally from so many people in the seat of Melbourne.

It was, it was that goes as far back as to the voice,

where, you know, one of the highest yes votes is in the seat of Melbourne.

And yet the Greens, until they locked in at the end, were constantly running interference as the government was trying to build it.

Do you remember that?

It was people, people are high information voters in this area.

They did not like it.

And then there's Gaza, where I think there was a view that some of the actions were too militant, too obsessive.

And so these things were actually, I'm telling you, they were factors in perceptions of what that party is because there is a consequence, like on the vote.

Claudia, you're right to observe it.

Like it's not a nothing.

And it's clearly possibly going to cost them, right?

Yeah, I think so.

And I mean, it's interesting because in Wills, where the, you know, Israel's bombardment of Gaza is a huge issue.

And for a lot of people, that was also something that they said, at least that we met, which obviously isn't a a scientific poll but it was interesting that people we met said I've actually switched my votes to the Greens because I care so much about how the government has responded to this issue and I don't think that it's been good enough but at the same time I think the Greens politically their reality is that they need to win over people for whom that that isn't the top deciding issue for their vote for whatever reason.

And I think too, it's really interesting hearing Adam Bant

talk about Labor candidates getting elected off the back of Liberal preferences because that's how he won the seat of Melbourne in 2010.

That was what got him over the line.

You know, at the 2013 election, the Greens were handing out flyers that were actually coloured blue.

And they said, if you voted liberal first, consider giving the Greens your second preference.

So this whole, you know, liberal preferences electing another candidate thing is actually something that the Greens have banked on.

And I think there's a There's a good reason for that, right?

Which is that as much as they maybe don't see it as part of their brand anymore,

there's the term tree Tory, right?

Which is basically somebody who's economically a bit more right-wing, but socially pretty progressive.

You'd call them a teal now.

But those people used to often vote for the Greens.

And so there's somebody who, for instance, might own an investment property, might not respond very well to somebody like Max Chandler-Mather's speeches, which do win over younger voters.

But you can't just put your eggs all in one basket.

And I think this is a really good example, potentially.

We'll have to see how it all plays out.

But you can't just rely on one demographic if it's younger voters or whichever demographic, right?

You also couldn't just rely on one gender or one community group or one ethnic group.

Exactly.

You need a broad offering.

And you can't rely, I think, to the extent that they seem to have relied on

people.

who have been fairly polarising for whatever reason.

You know, I was talking to people in Melbourne who kept mentioning Max Chandler Mather, who's an MP in Griffith in Brisbane, you know, hundreds hundreds and hundreds of kilometers away.

But people saw him and they responded to him, sometimes positively, but sometimes very negatively.

And I think, yeah, as we've both been saying, that's a pretty key factor.

I mean, just lastly, maybe the Trump, I think, has got to be a little bit of a factor here as well.

Not so much as in Canada, but when you look at what happened to the polling in Canada, it was not only that Polyover and the Conservatives fell off a cliff as the Trump stuff reared its head and the surge in support for the Liberals, but it was

the minor left party, the name, I think it might be the New Democrats, I'm probably going to get that wrong, totally fell off a cliff.

The sort of the alternative on the left of the Liberal Party

in Canada became a bit on the nose and people thought, look, this is existential.

We're just talking about, you know, the centre needing to hold, just trying to keep society on its kind of tether.

And that was what sort of saw a surge back towards the centre left.

Nothing quite that existential going on in the Australian election, but just that bubbling uncertainty about Trump that maybe pulls away in a few people's minds and makes them look at an Albanese government.

That I think many people on the left, and this is, you know, I guess goes into this influencer space, yeah, Hannah Ferguson, Abby Chatfield types.

I think their constituency was disappointed in the Labor government that hadn't been as progressive as they would have liked.

But maybe there's an element of Trump where at least some people in that ecosystem look at Labor and think, look, are they that bad?

We still want them to be the government.

And so we'll vote accordingly.

So that's the election.

And there's another part of the election, which is the teal seats, which in some places are coming back for the Liberals, which is so fascinating.

So we've got Kuyong, we've got Goldstein.

And then we've also now got, I think in play, Bradfield again.

If you look at the latest count, it's very close where the Independent was ahead there.

And now it looks like,

it's very close.

The postal, just to explain to our listeners, the postal game for the Liberals has been very, very, very strong, obviously.

So that's something that they were successful in doing, making sure that they had a postal vote campaign so that when all the postal votes came back in, they strongly are favouring the Liberal Party.

But that's a bit of an upset, isn't it, Claudia, that some of those teal seats might be coming back, even though the Liberals have polled so badly across the country.

Yeah, it does feel surreal, doesn't it?

It feels like a sort of,

it feels so strange compared to 2022 when you heard terms like greenslide and teal wave.

And now,

you know, it's all really about Labor, but we're seeing some of these seats look like they're going to return to the Liberals.

And I think there's probably a number of reasons for that.

I think Tom is absolutely right around this idea about Trump being a factor here, too.

I think people are seeking stability, whether they think that they can get that from one of the major parties or the other.

I think, too, these cost of living issues have really played into this.

I think the Teals have also faced a lot of, you know, very targeted advertising from the coalition in their seats.

That's not to say that they have been completely incompetent on that front.

They've had their own very targeted advertising.

But I think there also has perhaps been a bit of disappointment in some of the crossbench.

I think particularly because we didn't have a hung parliament in the last parliament, their impact has been, to be perfectly honest, fairly limited in terms of their actual power and influence.

Now, that's not to say they've been totally on the outer, but it perhaps wasn't exactly what people were hoping for.

And not to mention, too, the fact that Scott Morrison was a huge factor, I think, at the last election in some of these seats, particularly in regards to women and the women's vote and people kind of expressing their frustration with him.

But I think it's, I'm so curious to see how these seats are going to turn out because I'm particularly interested in Bradfield because we were there a couple of weeks ago.

That's Sydney's North Shore, if you haven't been there before, around Willoughby.

And Giselle Capterian, she is the Liberal candidate there, is exactly the sort of person that the Liberals need to get in the parliament if they want to keep building up their ranks in future.

She is an incredible communicator, to be perfectly honest.

Watching her interact with voters was a masterclass in how to do it.

She is incredibly qualified.

This woman was, you know, an international trade lawyer.

She's worked as an advisor for ministers.

She is very accomplished and a very good communicator and a woman.

And she's actually faced a bit of blowback after her pre-selection when her opponent said that that's why she was pre-selected.

Now, she obviously very much denies that, but she is the exact sort of person that they need to start getting into the parliament if they want to repair some of these issues that they've been seeing, not just this election, but really since 2022 and before.

I mean, I think a couple of kind of idiosyncratic factors in the two Melbourne ones, right, Kujong and Goldstein, in that they're probably the two most progressive of the...

the teal independents and not necessarily the two most progressive seats in a broad sense.

I think you look particularly at the booths in Goldstein and a similar story in McNamara, a really big swing towards the Liberals in Caulfield, where the Melbourne Jewish community is centred.

And there's a very obvious reason why the Liberal Party spent a lot of time talking to that constituency about the issue of anti-Semitism,

why that might be something that saw a vote driving to the Liberal Party, not necessarily away from anyone specific, but to the Liberal Party.

And then I think also in Kuyong and Goldstein being in Victoria, know, you've got to remember that these seats remain.

There are a lot of people who would have been liberal voters their whole lives.

They haven't suddenly stopped caring about fiscal conservatism and balanced budgets and that, you know, kind of low taxes that have always been the vote-getters and the reasons that these seats were liberal, even though there might be socially progressive attitudes.

And I think when you've got an Allen government with a lot of debt,

where that's the big talking point, is the amount of debt that the state's in and the trouble that its economy is in, that that might just kind of, I guess, erode any enthusiasm or

apathy and relaxed nature about a Labor government.

And I think, particularly, the Liberals, if I were them looking at Labor government, then now trying to decide how to spend its political capital, whether it wants to go after trusts or start doing something a little bit more ambitious in terms of wealth tax, whether it's super taxes, whatever it might be, I'd be looking at, you know, as the Liberal Party and people like Tim Wilson who talk a lot about things like super and saying we can get these seeds back the next time around because of people that are frustrated with what a Labor government is doing that that doesn't align with their ideology.

And so maybe in that sense, Koo Yong and Goldstein are kind of the canaries in the coal mine for how the Liberal Party might win those seats.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Look, there's a bit of a discussion about polling.

There clearly was some terrible polling for the Liberal Party, which

meant that they thought they were ahead in the key seats.

I mean, I don't think it was ever telling them they were about to win the election, but it was giving them some steer that they were ahead.

Although a lot of leaking now from even the pollster responsible uh well briefing notes being shared sort of suggesting that they were warning about peter dutton's approach and about the economic message but a lot of a lot of fights over polling

but it was all going in one direction tom i mean it you know maybe it didn't pick a landslide but we all saw that there was a trend to labor and you know the trend was labor's friend in your piece Tom, on the ABC website, you've written about how the youth vote factored into this.

I mean, as far as I can see, young people don't really answer pollsters' calls, do they?

They don't.

And it's a difficulty for polling in general, I think.

And look, there's always difficulty for pollsters in how they get their sample and what kind of corrections and weighting changes they need to make to their sample to try and make it what they think is representative.

It's, you know, a mix of art and science.

Someone who was not from one one of the major parties who was talking about some individual seat polling that they had was kind of talking about the difficulties of trying to gauge the youth vote and said, you know, young people,

they don't pick up phones, they don't have landlines.

So forget about it.

If you're a pollster that's still trying to use robocalls, forget about it.

You know, you're just getting kind of five total weirdos who might pick up the phone and then, you know, pretending that they're representative.

But even the online panels, the people who will kind of do these online polls for a couple of bucks are also, it's hard to know that you are getting a representative sample of young people unless you invest a lot of

time and money

in finding them.

It's a really expensive business.

So, for, you know, for us as,

you know, pundits and poll watchers for political operatives who want to understand how contests are shaping up, that question of how you can gauge is it's a really difficult one.

And look, some

parties and some operatives, the Greens do not do a lot of internal seat polling.

And I think in that sense, that might be something they want to reflect on after this election.

I was told by people in the greens that they thought it was basically a waste of money for them to invest in any kind of seat-by-seat polling that they'd just spend all that money on just having more resources to knock doors and advertise and that kind of thing and that was what was useful so they didn't actually see it as a good use of resources to try and learn what was going on in these seats so a question about the relevance of polling um for for groups like that but yeah finding out i guess it's a microcosm of what we're having in general in the media which is difficulty figuring out how to reach young people in the places where they are.

It dovetails with some of that social media influencer conversation as well.

Final word to you, Claudia.

Well, I think the only good thing about this perhaps is that it means we're not all clicking on links that are being sent to us via text and potentially getting scammed.

Like I don't think you could

palmer vote.

Apparently

if you send every text message three times a day to people randomly, your vote doesn't go up.

No, it doesn't.

Yeah.

but I think, yeah, what Tom said on the seat-by-seat polling, too, is really interesting because the Greens, yeah, very much were saying,

you know, we're not really focused on focus groups.

For instance, we're not really interested in doing seat-by-seat polling.

And I think that potentially, along with many other factors, has come home to roost here because it can also be very helpful, even if you're out door knocking, even if you're doing lots of advertising, to know where your weak areas are and to know what's putting downward pressure on your vote.

For instance, might have been helpful to know that some figures in the party were seen as deeply polarising, that some issues were also seen that way and to maybe work around that.

But I guess we're never going to know for sure.

But I suspect that they, like Set Tom says, might be changing their tune at the next election if they can afford it.

If they can afford it.

Wow, what a fascinating conversation.

I have had so much fun with you both.

Thank you.

Thanks for having us.

And thanks for considering as youth correspondents.

I think some of my friends

like that description.

Might age out seems like a both about to age out.

I mean, Millennials are considered youth up to 44.

I mean, our concept of youth in this aging country is hilarious.

So let's go with it, okay?

Absolutely.

That's it for politics now for today.

Claudia and Tom, of course, well, we call them our youth correspondents because just we felt like it.

Tomorrow, David Spears is back with me and we'll bring you the newest from the political sphere, including Labor, who are having, of course, big caucus meeting at the end of the week, trying to divvy up who gets in and who who gets out.

We'll give you

all of that intel.

And of course, we also like answering your questions.

Thursday, Fran will be answering all your questions, the party room at abc.net.au.

Catch you then.

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