Conservatives literally run on a platform of fear. Fear someone’s gonna take your shit. Fear of your comfortable life being uprooted. Vote for us or these will happen!!!
…which parts of those fears apply to liminals downwards? That’s been our SOE for two fucking decades.
Fear someone’s gonna take your shit
Can’t be conservative if you have nothing to conserve.
That said, I do have things to conserve but I still vote Greens because I have enough and I’m not utterly devoid of empathy.
For example, the Liberal Party is the party of home ownership…
More like the party for people who already own homes. All of their policies have been geared towards increasing the value of existing housing stock, transferring as much wealth to existing home owners as possible. Some examples of policies for existing home owners are capital gains tax discounts, first home buyer grants (lol, hand tax payer dollars straight to established owners) negative gearing and mass immigration.
Millennials watched this kick in to gear when Howard got in and it’s just been a giant f you to us from the major parties our whole adult lives.
The oldest zoomer isn’t even in their 30s yet. Seems a bit early to make predictions about their relative conservatism.
There is also a lot of talk about economic policy in this article but not much about social progressivism, which I think is where the big gap between my generation (millennial) and previous ones is being generated. Unlike any other generation before us, we have grown up completely connected to the rest of the world. We get our news direct from the source almost immediately, versus days late and heavily edited through a newspaper or news broadcast. I have have more international friends than any other generation in my family by an absolute mile. I think this awakening to the shared human experience has made our generation more caring and empathetic and thus more resistant to conservative policies which are more likely to have a narrow focus and be driven by selfishness.
Additionally, I think the fact that millennials have copped so much shit from conservatives over the last couple of decades has formed a wall of untrustworthiness that is going to be difficult for the Coalition to break down.
They’ve actively worked to undermine our very existence, while gleefully removing advantages that they often had that could’ve helped us - HECS, undermining medicare, creating housing crises because there’s no other way to make a buck in Australia since they went full neoliberal…
Yeah. Leopards, meet face.
And I think the responses in this article demonstrates that they still don’t actually understand the problem here. They think if they just create economic policies that specifically target us, we will vote for them like previous generations did. But to my earlier point, I think our generation (and future ones) are increasingly concerned with how economic policies affect everyone. It’s not enough to just help me buy a house or lower my student debt. I don’t want to see future generations face the same problems, or worse, that my generation has and I think this is a sentiment shared by many younger people today. The social connections we have made through the internet and looming global existential threats like climate change have created a generational consciousness that is wider in scope and more concerned with tomorrow than those that came before it.
TBH I don’t see a way back for them.
They’ve wedged themselves with this culture war nonsense. They’d need to wind that back to become popular enough to form a majority, but that would drive away their ‘core’ voters. I suspect they’ll soon be relegated to the electoral effectiveness of One Nation. Especially as the media landscape continues to evolve.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see someone like the Greens forming the official opposition within a few years.
This reads like satire:
growing up in hyper-individualised contexts – an auto-play, after-pay environment – which differs greatly from the lives of their parents and grandparents, for whom the realisation of aspiration often involved planning, sacrifice and deferred gratification
Even when they are trying to appeal to young people, they don’t even attempt to hide their condescension and contempt.
