It’s been 30 years since Natasha Stott Despoja became the youngest woman ever elected to the Australian Parliament. A 25-year-old Sarah Hanson-Young beat that record slightly in 2007.

Just over a decade later, the Australian Electoral Commission has confirmed another record-breaking young woman will be entering parliament: 21-year-old Charlotte Walker, in sixth Senate spot for South Australia.

Walker’s election is remarkable because she’s young and she’s female. Both these characteristics run against long-standing trends in Australian politics.

It’s also a reminder of why young people’s representation, both inside and outside parliament, matters for the whole society.

In the 2025 election, Gen Z and Millennial voters outnumbered older generations.

While we cannot treat the “youth vote” as a homogeneous bloc, expert analysis of the lower house votes shows young people contributed to the shift away from the Liberals and minor parties in specific seats.

This groundswell helped create a landslide of support for Labor, despite a primary vote of less than 35%.

Amid these changes, Walker joins a select few very young people ever elected to federal parliament.

Wyatt Roy remains the youngest person to take up a federal political post. He was just 20 years old when he entered the lower house in 2010, representing the Queensland seat of Longman for the Liberals.

In 2017, 23-year-old Jordan Steele-John became the youngest senator in Australia’s history, representing the Greens for Western Australia.

According to the

© The Conversation