The new faces of Menzies’ forgotten voters

Looking for Menzies, and the voters who might well decide the next government?  

Try Box Hill in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, where apartment towers and cranes loom over Asian restaurants offering bargain menus in three languages. Or Templestowe, waiting at the bus stops sprinkled through suburbia. On days off, they might be found swimming or walking in the bushland enclave of Warrandyte. 

And on any day, they’re thick on the ground at work or play in the retail behemoth of Westfield Doncaster.

But the voters within this key electorate — which was until 2022 a safe Liberal stronghold — aren’t the middle-class, mature-aged, home-owning locals the Coalition used to be able to rely on. This election, the battle, at least in this seat, could well be decided by gen Z. A generational turning point in Australian politics, 2025 is the first time millennial and gen Z voters will outnumber baby boomers at the ballot box. 

Born somewhere between the late 1990s and early 2010s, depending on where you draw the line, gen Z is made up of late teens and twenty-somethings. They are renters and students, underpaid professionals in the grind era of their careers, and increasingly, a political wildcard. 

Gen Z is the last generation whose baby photos were taken on digital cameras, not iPhones. Not quite “iPad kids” (that’s gen alpha), they came of age alongside the internet, where everything from missile strikes and mass shootings to makeup tutorials and meme compilations has only ever been a Google search away. 

Gen Z is also the first generation to grow up with full awareness of the climate crisis and the warming planet they’re set to inherit. They still feel the fallout of COVID isolation and economic insecurity, having spent critical formative years in lockdown. Most can’t ever imagine owning a home.  

In Menzies, these new voters are minimum-wage workers, students and young professionals. They’re long-term renters, despite the electorate being markedly more educated and affluent than average. Gen Z and millennial voters together now constitute 38% of the Menzies electorate, a growing, sizeable chunk, albeit lower than the national average of 47%. 

But Menzies is also fascinating for the fact that it has the highest numbers of Chinese-Australian voters, followed by neighbouring Chisholm.

Among those 26% of residents with Chinese ancestry, a generational shift is underway. Young, second-generation Chinese Australians, no longer content with voting the same way their parents have, may well decide Saturday’s result.

Walker Ren, a 29-year-old medical doctor working at St Vincent’s Hospital, says he hasn’t decided who he will be voting for. 

Asked which way he is leaning, Ren says “Let’s see whose promises sound more appealing — I’ll eat that cake.”

Ren’s reply is a nod to the Chinese saying “painting a cake”, used to describe promises that sound good but rarely materialise.

Ren moved to Melbourne with his parents when he was 10 and grew up in Box Hill, where he still lives. 

Until now, he says, he has always followed his father’s direction on where to cast his vote. And, he notes, his father’s vote has always been defined by policies that would deliver some benefit to the Chinese community.

But Ren signals that as his generation matures, this might be shifting.

As a young professional seeking more government support for career development, Ren says he’ll vote for the policies that directly benefit him and the services he needs. This election, he’s going to be voting in line with his own interests, not his father’s. 

“Most of the younger generation, at least all my friends, think this way,” Ren says.

Grappling with global upheaval, economic uncertainty and climate anxiety, many have little time for traditional politics. But it would be a mistake to interpret gen Z’s detachment from politics-as-usual as indifference, according to pollsters and experts tracking their impact on this campaign. 

Though when asked to talk politics, most decline. Aiden Mulhern, trying on footy boots, considers the question about what’s on his mind this election — his second as a voter — long enough to signal that what’s on top of his mind are global events. But he’s cynical, if not despairing. 

“Protesters put pressure on our government to do something, but they can’t do anything,” says Mulhern. “No-one is going to listen to them.”

Claire Goulter, 23, is pushing a trolley loaded with rubbish out of the coffee shop where she’s working a shift. Sure, she’s up for a quick chat about the looming federal election and her vote in what may be one of the defining battlegrounds. 

Goulter only enrolled in 2022 at the last minute and says if not for her mum getting on her back, she might not have bothered. Her lack of excitement about the electoral process is widely shared in her cohort, with gen Z voters that year telling one survey their key motivation was to avoid a fine. 

Rolling up to the voting centre in Box Hill, Goulter recalls scanning the pamphlets thrust at her, each promising to fix something — housing, climate change, university HECS fees. She tucked them under her arm and when she got into the booth marked #1 next to the candidate she vibed with the most.  

“I’m like, oh shit, okay. I didn’t really know what I was voting for.”  

This time around she’s eager to cast a more informed ballot, she says, but she’s vague about her process. She’s suspicious of mainstream media, and determined to “collect as much information as I trust”.  

More accurately, these young voters should be recognised as “overwhelmed” — casualties of the firehose of information technology they were raised on — says Dr Intifar Chowdhury, a youth researcher and lecturer in government at Flinders University. 

“You just need to look at the daily swamping of news,” she says.   

Neither are they lazy or flaky, as they are often characterised — generalisations Chowdhury describes as condescending. “Calling young people lazy is testament to how out of touch somebody is.” 

Today’s young adults are navigating a vastly different path to adulthood than previous generations, Chowdhury says, with traditional milestones like homeownership, parenthood, and long-term commitment being postponed.  

“That means you’re younger for longer.” 

Younger voters have disconnected from the traditional party loyalties that defined their parents’ and grandparents’ voting behaviors, she says. While boomers were generally stable lifetime voters who looked to the major parties for cues, zoomers are more volatile.  

“Younger people are more likely to be issue-aligned, rather than partisan-aligned,” Chowdhury says. 

“So rather than looking up to political parties, what they do is think about, ‘Okay, what issue am I most concerned about?’, and then take that to the poll and make a voting decision.” 

So what issues will be on the minds of the gen Zs of Menzies as they cast their votes this Saturday? 

For 19-year-old Alyse Cook, it’s housing. Stuck living at home with mum and dad to manage the cost of going to university, for Alyse, the dream of renting a room in a sharehouse is out of reach, let alone buying a home in her own neighbourhood.

“Honestly, I just think the main political parties aren’t going to do much to help people in my situation,” she says. 

“It feels like a lot of empty promises,” she says, “just like some sort of performance they’re doing to show that they’re changing things, but they just aren’t.” 

Even as cost of living pressures eclipse climate change as a top priority this election, the latter issue is still a cause for concern and fury for 20-something Abbi Low in Doncaster East. 

“The environment is a big issue for me because I love spending time in nature. So when I do see environments not being taken care of, that really pisses me off,” she says. 

Against a tide of commentary painting gen Z as disengaged and disinterested, younger voters are more tuned-in than they’re given credit for. 

Laura Mayne, a 23-year-old, has held a seat on Manningham Council since she was 19. (Yes, dad is Stephen Mayne, Crikey founder, and according to his daughter, a “professional shit stirrer” notorious for running in every election he can.) She is urging more young people to step up.

“Politics is treated as this high-brow, intellectual space when it’s not, it’s everyday life,” she says. 

“In terms of the roads you drive on, the quality of the services you use. It’s not just a few basic issues that are in Canberra. It’s all around you.”

This story is part of “Inside Marginal Menzies”, a reporting project published in collaboration with the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne. You can read the full series on The Citizen.