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. 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........

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