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Mine has a bit of sadness in it – I’m leaving The Daily Aus next week, making this my last edition of the weekend newsletter. It’s been a great joy and privilege interacting with you here. I’ll miss it, but I’m looking forward to watching it continue to grow in the hands of TDA’s talented journalists.

For my final column, I want to offer a few reflections on young people, who are central to TDA’s work.

Millennial and Generation Z Australians (I’m somewhere in between the two, so I loosely lay claim to both) have often felt overlooked by their politicians.

That is starting to change, especially after the 2022 federal election. Political leaders are waking up to the importance of young voters and are eager to engage.

Still, that engagement will fall flat if it isn’t backed by a willingness to take young people and their political concerns seriously. In today’s column, I offer two observations about what those political concerns are and where they come from.

If there’s one stereotype that defines Millennials and Generation Z, it is their vocal support for political causes.

Depending on your perspective, today’s youth are ‘politically conscious’, ‘activists’, ‘social justice warriors’ or ‘virtue signallers’ – terms which broadly describe the same phenomenon.

There is an element of truth to this. Ahead of last year’s federal election, our audience overwhelmingly nominated climate change as the top issue. TDA’s reporting about issues of racial injustice, gendered violence and other forms of discrimination regularly garners enormous engagement.

When it comes to voting patterns, the most simplistic analysis indicates young people are significantly more likely to favour progressive parties. A significant majority of Millennial and Generation Z Australians voted for either Labor or the Greens at the last election, and younger voters in Australia, the UK and the U.S. so far appear less likely to shift towards conservative parties as they age than previous generations did.

However, to understand why, I think we need to look a little deeper than voting patterns. Why do young people care about the things they care about?

Everyone has a theory – some suggest young people have it so good they have the ‘luxury’ of focusing on ‘fashionable’ causes. For me, the answer has more to do with history.

I was born in 1996, a few years after the end of the Cold War. That decades-long war was cast as a contest between two rival models for society – the capitalism and democracy of the U.S. and the communism and authoritarianism of the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union crumbled and the U.S. emerged victorious, the Cold War gave way to a period of optimism. A U.S. academic famously referred to it as ‘the end of history’ – events and conflicts would continue, the argument went, but the basic problems of human organisation had been solved.

The world today’s young people grew up in was tinged with that collective optimism, even as it started to fade in the wake of 9-11, the Iraq War and the Global Financial Crisis.

I have often remarked that history was taught to me in ‘past tense’ – the great wars and conflicts of history did not feel like things that could happen again, and the great social progress against discrimination felt irreversible.

I’ve often spoken to peers who share this memory of childhood naivety. Unsurprisingly, few if any still feel that way. The world feels closer to a global conflict than it has at any point in our young lifetimes. Systematic global failures have led to a failure to combat man-made climate change. The 20^th century’s great progress on gender and racial inequality has changed some things, but it has not rooted out the darkest examples of discrimination, as we see in the continually high rates of gendered violence and racialised criminal justice systems.

For many young people I know, all this has created a sense of ‘whiplash’. The optimism of our childhood has been replaced with anxiety and, in many cases, helplessness. When it comes to politics, this often means a focus on the systemic causes of political problems, borne of a recognition they are deeply entrenched.

When it comes to climate change, young people want to talk not just about emissions reduction mechanisms but about the problems they see in the economic system that unleashed climate change. When it comes to discrimination, young people want to move beyond superficial gestures towards equality and tackle the systems they see as responsible for perpetuating discrimination.

Issues like climate change and discrimination are often associated with progressive politics and parties (although not inherently so). But the same tendency to focus on the system can manifest in other ways, too. For example, the U.S. has seen some evidence of an increase in high school boys with strongly conservative social views. Influencers like Andrew Tate can tap into young frustrations with ‘the system’ to lead people to dramatically different conclusions.

The common feature: young people want their politicians and media to take systems seriously. Surface-level reporting and surface-level policy responses won’t cut it.

There’s another element to the youth stereotype which I think misses the mark – that young people care so much about ‘social’ issues because the 21^st century gives them the ‘luxury’ to do so.

While many young people in countries like Australia enjoy a standard of living which would once have been unthinkable, it’s equally true that our economic outlook is precarious.

Current trajectories suggest millennials are set to be the first generation in living memory to be financially worse off than their parents. The economic consequences of climate change, of growing inequality and stagnating wage growth, and of ever-more-expensive housing, all play a part.

And just like any generation, young people care when their economic outcomes are unsatisfactory. Stories about discrimination or other ‘social justice’ issues might get high levels of engagement among TDA’s audience, but stories about the cost of living or the housing market do too.

In the TDA audience poll ahead of last year’s election, which had climate change as number one, housing was number two. The subsequent period of rapidly-growing rental prices has only increased young anger about the issue. 

The same anger can be seen in many economic contexts – TDA’s audience seems to get just as angry at airlines, supermarkets and banks they perceive to be ‘ripping them off’ than they do at fossil fuel companies.

That offers opportunities for politicians across the political spectrum. Any party who can meaningfully address the economic concerns of young voters is likely to make headway.

In both senses, then, the answer is the same. Young people think seriously about the world they live in and want to be taken seriously. Politicians and the media should look beyond stereotypes about ‘the Instagram and TikTok generation’ and embrace this seriousness.

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