Why Australia’s Gen Z is unlike any voting cohort before it and why every institution built for the old Australia is about to find out.

Every generation of Australians before this one was socialised by place. You grew up in a suburb, and that suburb came with an inheritance, a history: a local footy club, an RSL, a pub, a masthead your parents read at the kitchen table that belonged to your state or regional city.

Kosmos Samaras

Your politics, your team, your sense of who was “us” and who was “them”, all of it was shaped by geography. The Liberal Party of Menzies and the Labor Party of the postwar settlement were both, in their own ways, machines for organising people by where they lived and the connections they had to all these important social and community anchors.

Gen Zs are not bound by those anchors. They are the first generation of Australians socialised not by place but by connectivity. Their formative communities were not the street or the suburb but the group chat, the feed, the server. A 17-year-old in Werribee, a 19-year-old in Blacktown and a 22-year-old in Logan are consuming the same content, at the same time, shaped by the same recommendation algorithms, algorithms that neither know nor care which electorate they live in.

This matters enormously, because everything we know about how Australians form political identity assumed the old model. And the old model is dead.

A cohort without an internal gradient

Here is the first thing our research keeps showing, and it surprises people every time: there is no meaningful attitudinal gradient inside this generation. The 18-year-old and the 28-year-old look the same. Same values, same media diet, same voting behaviour, same economic anxieties.

That is genuinely new. Previous generations showed internal drift – even Millennials, who drifted from Greens to Labor – when the older end of a cohort had begun accumulating assets, marrying, moving to the mortgage belt, their politics softened accordingly. The conservative parties and to a lesser extent, the Labor Party with Millennials, could simply wait for young people to age into home ownership and, with it, into their column.

Gen Z has not aged into anything, because the asset escalator they were promised has been switched off. The 28-year-old is renting like the 21-year-old, precariously employed like the 21-year-old, and locked out of ownership like the 21-year-old. When material circumstances don’t diverge, neither do politics. The life-cycle theory of conservatism required a life cycle. There isn’t one anymore, or at best, the life-cycle has drastically changed.

Progressive, but not in the way the Greens think

Gen Z is the most socially progressive generation in Australian history. On climate, on gender, on multiculturalism, on sexuality, the debates that consumed their parents are simply settled questions for them.

However – and this is where most commentary gets them wrong – their progressivism is not primarily cultural. It is economic. This is a generation psychologically predisposed to economic populism: hostile to concentrated wealth, cynical about corporate power, convinced the housing market is rigged (because it is, against them) and increasingly comfortable with state intervention that would have made their Gen X parents flinch. They want someone to name the enemy, and the enemy they recognise is not the migrant or the welfare recipient. It’s the landlord, the bank, the supermarket duopoly.

This is why right-wing populism keeps bouncing off them. One Nation is currently discovering its ceiling: Gen Z is a large part of what that ceiling is made of. In our research, only around one in 10 of this cohort will entertain a One Nation vote; among young women, the figure collapses into the single digits. Gen Z women are, on our data, the most progressive demographic segment ever measured in this country. The gender gap inside this generation is real and widening but note what the gap is between: young women who are hyper-progressive, and young men who are, mostly still progressive, just less so. The manosphere drift among a minority of young men is real and worth watching but it’s still a minority. It is not, on current evidence, an electoral majority-maker for the populist right in Australia the way it has been elsewhere.

The structural point is this: One Nation’s coalition is being assembled almost entirely from older generations living in outer suburban and regional Australia. That coalition is demographically finite. Every electoral cycle, roughly 400,000 to 500,000 new Gen Z voters come onto the roll, and nine in ten of them are unavailable to the populist right. By the close of this decade there will be more than five million Gen Z Australians enrolled to vote.

The most diverse generation ever enrolled

The 2021 Census marked a threshold moment: for the first time, a majority of Australians, 51.5 per cent, were either born overseas or had a parent born overseas. By June 2024, the overseas-born share of the population had reached 31.5 per cent, the second-highest proportion since records began in 1891.

Gen Z sits at the leading edge of that transformation. They are disproportionately the children of the post-1990s migration waves, Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Nepalese, which means the second-generation share of this cohort is far higher than the national average. In the electorates where Gen Z is concentrating, first- and second-generation Australians already constitute supermajorities: Fowler at 89 per cent, Blaxland and Watson at 88, Werriwa at 83, Calwell at 81, Gorton at 78.

For this generation, multicultural Australia is not a policy or a debate. It is simply who they are. A politics of grievance directed at migration is asking them to be suspicious of their classmates, their teammates, their parents, themselves. It will not land and this, again, is a hard demographic constraint on the populist right that no amount of algorithmic amplification can dissolve. Even if you pay for the bot farms.

They are also the most formally educated generation Australia has produced. More of them finish school, more of them hold or are pursuing tertiary qualifications. Education remains one of the strongest predictors of resistance to right-populist messaging anywhere in the developed world.

What education does not predict, for this cohort, is economic security and a generation that is simultaneously highly credentialed and materially locked out is a generation primed for exactly the economic populism described above. Educated and aggrieved is a combustible combination. It historically produces movements, revolutions and not apathy. They are not comfortable and relaxed.

Where they will decide elections

So where does five million votes’ worth of this actually land?

Not evenly. Gen Z’s electoral weight is concentrating in three kinds of seats.

First, the outer suburban growth corridors, the Calwells, Gortons, Lalors, Werriwas, McMahons and Greenways of the world, plus their Queensland and WA equivalents. These are the seats where young, diverse families priced out of the middle ring are landing. They are also, not coincidentally, the seats where the first-and-second-generation share runs at 70 to 89 per cent.

The populist right looks at outer suburbia and sees fertile ground; it is misreading the map. Outer suburbia is splitting into two different countries, an older, third-generation cohort genuinely available to One Nation, and a young, diverse cohort that is structurally immune. Both live in the same postcode. Only one of them is growing.

Second, the inner metropolitan renter belt, Melbourne, Wills, Grayndler, Sydney, Griffith, Brisbane, Perth. These are seats where Gen Z renters are already numerous enough to define the contest, and where the competition is not left versus right but Labor versus Greens versus community independents; it’s an argument about which flavour of progressive politics owns the future. Watch the rental crisis do to these seats what interest rates once did to the mortgage belt.

Third, and least appreciated: the university-and-TAFE provincial cities. Geelong, Newcastle, Wollongong, Ballarat. Regional Australia is routinely described as ageing and conservative, and in aggregate it is. But its cities are quietly accumulating young, educated populations that behave politically like inner-metro voters.

The compounding effect is the thing to hold onto. Every three years, the oldest, most conservative cohort of the electoral roll is replaced by the youngest, most diverse, most progressive cohort in the country’s history. Compulsory voting makes this arithmetic merciless: in Australia, unlike America, you don’t need to mobilise this generation. The AEC does it for you. You just have to not repel them.

It isn’t just politics

Everything above could be written about any western democracy. What makes the Australian case distinctive is how totally this generation has detached from the national institutions that were supposed to socialise them. Politics is merely the last institution to notice.

Sport noticed first and is actively working on the challenge. This is a generation more likely to follow a European football club than an AFL club. A kid in Melbourne’s north is more emotionally invested in Arsenal or Real Madrid teams playing at 2am, 13,000 kilometres away, than in the team whose ground they could reach by tram or train. Why? Because their community isn’t the tram line. It’s the feed. The Premier League understood algorithmic distribution, short-form content and fandom-as-identity a decade before Australian codes did, and it has harvested a generation of Australian children accordingly. Australian sports’ problem is not a product problem. It’s a distribution-of-childhood problem, and it is exactly the same problem the major parties have.

Media noticed second. This generation hardly reads a newspaper, not the print product, not the website, not the app. Their consumption of legacy media of any kind is marginal. Television news is something that plays in the background at their grandparents’ house. They get their information, political, financial, cultural, from creators, and here is the part that terrifies both editors and campaign directors: they are more likely to be persuaded by someone organically online than by any institutional voice. Not by an ad. Not by a masthead. Not by a press conference. By a person, in their feed, who has earned parasocial trust over hundreds of hours of content, talking to camera about issues relevant to them and their global world.

This has a brutal implication for campaigning. The entire architecture of Australian political communication, the press gallery drop, the front-page endorsement, the TV blitz in the final fortnight, is built to reach people who no longer exist, through channels this generation never opens. Money spent shouting at Gen Z through legacy channels isn’t inefficient. It’s dumb. The campaigns that reach them will do it the way everything else reaches them: natively, organically, through voices the algorithm already trusts. The politicians who grasp this will look like they’re everywhere. The ones who don’t will spend millions and be seen nowhere.

And what’s true for parties is true for every consumer-facing industry in the country. Banks, insurers, retailers, sporting codes, super funds, anyone whose business model quietly assumes that Australians age into the habits of their parents is holding an assumption this generation has already falsified. They will not age into the newspaper, the free-to-air bulletin, the local footy club membership, the Coalition vote or the quarter-acre block, because the escalator that carried previous generations into those destinations has been dismantled.

The generation that arrived before the country was ready

None of this makes Gen Z’s politics permanent. Generations are shaped by circumstance, and circumstances change. Give this cohort secure housing, real wage growth and a stake in the asset economy, and some of the populist energy will drain away. That, frankly, is the strongest argument for doing it.

But the deeper features are not circumstantial. The diversity is permanent. The education is permanent. The socialisation by connectivity rather than place is permanent, you cannot un-raise a generation. And the internal cohesion, the absence of any gradient between 21 and 28, means this cohort will move through the electorate not as a dispersing cloud but as a bloc, five-million strong by decade’s end and growing every cycle.

Australian institutions, parties, mastheads, codes, brands, spent the last decade asking when this generation would grow up and become like everyone else.

The honest answer is: they already grew up. They’re just not becoming like anyone we’ve seen before.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/07/gen-z-is-not-ageing-into-the-old-australia/

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