Liberals Dumped Net Zero – and Handed the Youth Vote to Labor and the Teals on a Silver Platter
By Peter Brown
By abandoning the 2050 target, Sussan Ley’s party has turned a slow bleed into a full-blown haemorrhage among under-45s. Insiders call it electoral suicide. The numbers agree.
It took the Liberal Party exactly one party-room meeting to confirm what younger Australians already suspected: the adults in the blue ties have given up on their future.
On 12 November 2025, the federal Liberals quietly buried their commitment to net zero emissions by 2050. No formal vote, no fanfare – just a consensus among the 49 MPs in the room that the target was “unrealistic” and economically dangerous. In its place: a vague promise to cut emissions “as fast as technology allows” and “in line with comparable countries,” backed by new gas, new nuclear, and no forced coal closures.
For the dwindling band of Liberal moderates, it felt like the last helicopter leaving Saigon. One described the mood as “funereal.” Another simply texted colleagues: “We just lost every seat inside the tram tracks.”
They’re not wrong.
The Liberal primary vote among Gen Z has already collapsed to single digits in some urban samples. Among millennials it hovers in the low twenties – barely half Labor’s haul. The 2025 election delivered the party its worst result since 1944. Ditching net zero looks less like a circuit-breaker and more like throwing petrol on a dumpster fire that was already fully involved.
Internal research presented to the party room by federal director Andrew Hirst was blunt: voters – especially women under 50 and city professionals – treat “net zero” as shorthand for “we actually give a damn about climate change.” Abandon the target and you abandon the issue. Abandon the issue and you abandon the demographics that decide elections in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.
Former Liberal president Jason Falinski put it in the starkest terms: “We are telling an entire generation that we have given up. They will punish us for a decade.”
They already are.
In the teal seats the Liberals need to win back – Kooyong, Goldstein, Wentworth, Mackellar, Curtin – climate credibility was the single biggest reason independents toppled sitting Liberals in 2022 and again in 2025. Labor strategists privately admit they barely had to campaign on the issue; the Liberals did the heavy lifting for them simply by sounding like they were still arguing about whether climate change was real.
Susan Ley’s defenders insist the 2050 target was always a vote-loser in the suburbs and the regions. They point to the Coalition’s wipe-out in outer-metropolitan mortgages belts as proof that cost-of-living, not climate, is what punishes governments. But the data tells a different story: the seats that swung hardest against the Coalition in May were precisely the ones with the youngest median ages and the highest proportion of voters under 45.
As one Liberal staffer lamented after the decision: “Old voters are dying. That’s bad for us. Young voters are enrolling at record rates. That’s now catastrophic.”
For now, the Ley opposition is betting that cheap power bills and culture-war red meat will outweigh a livable planet in the minds of enough swinging voters. It’s a gamble that might work in a handful of Queensland regionals and Western Sydney mortgage belts.
Everywhere else – especially anywhere a 28-year-old can afford an apartment – the message is landing loud and clear: the Liberal Party just told an entire generation to get stuffed.
History suggests they’ll remember that at the ballot box. For a very long time.
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That is an empty photo of empty people, and empty of policy, decency, duty, sense, purpose, reason, logic, needs, awareness…futility abounds.
So far as the Liberals losing the youth vote is concerned I think that could change dramatically if Andrew Hastie takes the leadership. Auntie Susan can take leadership in the tea room.
There’s a long way to go to the next election, and as per that stupid quote “the undecides remain the undecides’ rings true at this point.
We don’t know what is going to emerge post Ley or any other critical chaotic aspect that will play out, brain farts a given known, however never underestimate that will to survive or under estimate one’s capacity to get a grip on matters political and its drivers.
Nuclear does not appeal to them, ongoing discrimination does not appeal to them, being held down by gutless wonders and flaws and weak policy does not appeal to them and ambition still fuels the fire.
More eloquent than I could ever be https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/11/20/the-political-the-personal-and-the-polemical-eric-foner-on-freedom/
I’ve included this publishing from USA because that’s where the Liberals get their idea’s from.
I’m struggling to see a good reason to support the Teals.
They have a couple of policies, the rest they make up as they go.
They are a policy free zone, and those that vote for them can only hope they meet their commitment to take positions based in community consultation.
My experience is that Teals don’t.
My local member (Monique Ryan in Kooyong) makes captain’s calls on significant issues, is unresponsive to questions of legitimate concern (that she might find inconvenient) and deals mainly with her pet topics.
There are plenty of small parties (eg Australian Democrats) that work hard to maintain a presence and develop a range of progressive policies that they publish. They can be held to account. They have leadership and co-ordination, they are participative.
A parliament with a dozen or more Teals holding the balance of power would be chaotic.
Think more carefully before voting for Teals. Vote for a political party.
Like elsewhere we are observing generation and other gaps on age, education, diversity, being informed and urban/regional; ALP endeavours to fill the gap?
Mediocrates:
Why do you think Hastie would attract young voters? The classic handsome war hero trope is not going to go far with people genuinely concerned about having a viable future.