And the problem is particularly acute among young women.
Polling analysis undertaken by strategy firm Crosby Textor showed only one in four women aged 18-34 voted Liberal at this year’s state election in seats contested with Labor or Teal candidates.
While not as incendiary as Rath,NSW Liberal frontbencher James Griffin,the group’s elder and founder,says after 12 years in government and with the party at a crossroads,there is really only one option:“Adapt or die”.
“We’ve got to evolve,” he said.
With Millennials now representing a quarter of the Liberal party room,Griffin said younger MPs have an opportunity to use their growing influence to change the policy platform to attract younger voters back into the conservative fold.
“It seemed that we were missing an opportunity to not more effectively use and leverage that collection of young people to connect with the voting group that we need to have supporting us to succeed in future elections,” he said.
A member of the Legislative Council,Munro agrees. “The reality is that if we don’t convince younger voters and women to vote for us,we will never be a party of government.”
“If there are Liberal Party members who aren’t prepared to compromise on long-held views,are they prepared to lose indefinitely?” she said.
The Liberal “broad church” was being tested as polarisation pulled the party further part,Munro said,but she urged the party to “resist the temptation for short-term notoriety” to speak to the political centre.
Both Munro and Griffin agree the Liberals needs to do more to address their brand perception,something they argue can be done through better messaging of the party’s achievements.
But the reason for the party’s young-person struggles still puzzles some.
Former premier Dominic Perrottet was the youngest premier in NSW history after he replaced Gladys Berejiklian in October 2021.
And the NSW Liberals pursued a more moderate brand than the conservative Coalition in Canberra,pushing an agenda on climate change,universal pre-kindergarten and poker machine reform.
Yet still,young voters rejected the Coalition en masse.
Premier Chris Minns has made resolving the housing crisis a central tenet of his first term of government,clearly identifying the swiftly shifting political fault lines as a generation of young people become locked out of the property market.
With NSW Liberal leader Mark Speakman and his cabinet cautious about the political risks of going hard on housing supply,Rath argues the idea imposing housing targets and greater density will upset large swaths of local communities is “largely bulls---.”
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