Young Australians’ futures are being sold out from under them – and nobody in Canberra has a serious answer

Young Australians today aren’t facing conscription to a faraway war.

They don’t have double-digit interest rates, and they don’t have to walk 15km to get to school.

They’re able to order food to their door at the tap of a button, and they have ready access to endless entertainment on their screens.

On the surface, it’s easy to think that young Australians have it good compared to previous generations.

But these material comforts and easy pleasures mask a generation that is being hollowed out from within – spiritually, economically, socially.

They are, according to studies, unhappier than ever before.

Their purchasing power is diminishing rapidly, compared with older generations.

They are the least religious, the loneliest, and the most socially isolated.

And they aren’t reproducing – delaying marriage and family formation at an alarming rate.

The issue isn’t so much that they face a future of uncertainty; it’s that they face a future of certainty – and that certainty is increasingly bleak.

They can see what’s coming down the road, and it isn’t pretty.

If current trends persist, young people exiting school and university now face a housing market that is closer to an oligarchy or a failed state than to a democracy, where only the children of the wealthy can afford to inherit a home.

They face an impending demographic cliff – a turning point – where low birth rates and continued mass immigration will irreversibly alter the cultural and demographic composition of the nation they grew up in.

They face increasing government overreach, with legislation upon legislation taking away their freedom and online privacy in favour of big-state safetyism.

They face a tide of increasingly violent crimes creeping onto their doorstep and into their homes, with the nightly news regularly reporting machete fights and violent home robberies.

They face a debilitating combination of deteriorating university standards and growing student debt – a debt that’s pegged to out-of-control inflation.

And once they do inevitably enter the workforce – no matter if they are skilled or unskilled – they’re competing with millions of new migrants, both for jobs and homes.

The weekend humiliation ritual of getting outbid at an auction turns into the degrading spectacle of lining up with hundreds of others to inspect a rental.

And from school to university, they’re told their identity is not to be one to be proud of – but one to be guilty of.

Removed from their roots, devoid of a community, economically displaced, it’s no wonder young Australians opt for cocktail bars or video games – for many of them, the regular life they were promised has been priced out.

They are becoming Australia’s lost generation.

To date, young people’s response has been a flight to safety.

Labor – positioning themselves as the safety net – offers them HECS handouts and first-home subsidies, both band-aid solutions at best.

But counterintuitively, the Albanese government also silently delivers them continued mass immigration – the very issue currently displacing young Australians.

The Greens also attract the young – not so much because of their policies, but more because they’re seen as the most radical party.

Young people are angry and depressed, and they’re looking either to big government or radical change as a way out.

Nobody on the conservative side has yet channelled or matched the anger that young Australians feel.

They’ve failed to propose serious action on immigration – the single issue that is upstream from many of the problems they face – nor given them hope that a different path is possible.

They haven’t offered a future worth investing in or working hard for.

In 2025, telling a young Australian to pull themselves up by their bootstraps no longer works, because hard work no longer pays.

The flip side of this is that young Australians are still incredibly talented, energetic, and well-meaning.

A conversation with them over Christmas lunch will reveal that.

They are a generation of untapped potential that – if harnessed properly – could propel Australia out of its economic sclerosis and decline and into something better.

The common slogan is that young people aren’t becoming conservatives because they have nothing to conserve.

Not only that, but young Australians have stopped caring about Australia, because Australia has stopped caring about them.

The solution to their misguided voting habits shouldn’t be derision, but guidance – to acknowledge the bleak future they face and give them something serious to opt into.

And come election day, any side that gives them their country and future back, will get their support in return.