Take a look at the polling around the Voice, say. Or as regards voting intentions at the next national election. Or look at Australians’ commitment to democracy and to our Western civilisation’s heritage. Heck, pick just about any political, moral or constitutional topic that divides the voters in this country and you’ll notice that the young – let’s say those under 30 – lean noticeably to the left. For virtually all issues they are the most left-leaning in society.  Of course, most of us know the famous quip attributed to Winston Churchill along the lines of ‘if a man isn’t a socialist by the time he’s 25 then he hasn’t got a heart; if he isn’t a conservative by the time he’s 40 he hasn’t got a brain’. Leave aside the fact that Churchill never actually said this – heck, the great man was himself a Tory by the age of 15. Still, the underlying idea of the maxim is that over the course of most people’s lives they move politically from the left to the right as they take on real responsibilities and start having to pay tax, that sort of thing. Now I’ve always been a bit sceptical about any and all hard-and-fast generalisations. After all, they’re lazily broad and anyway where’s the evidence that the preponderance of people trace out that sort of voting trajectory over the course of their lives? It certainly conflicts with our sense that a couple of generations ago there was a strong correlation between economic class and voting likelihood and that that didn’t shift much over time. Plus, Steven Pinker likes to point to identical-twin studies that show these separated-at-birth clones, with very different upbringings and economic conditions at home, have remarkably similar and stable voting preferences to each other when they’re tracked down years later. So this faux Churchillian aperçu is no iron law of democratic life; at best it observes a pattern or trajectory that is moderately common – that quite a few young people do happen to flirt with left-wing political views in their teens and twenties before adopting more conservative ones when they get a bit older.

And here’s where it gets interesting.  You see a certain slice of the parliamentary Liberal party brains trust has hit upon the idea that this pattern of the young tending to move right as they age is no longer holding up anywhere near as much as it did. (I might have called this slice the ‘freedom wing’ of the parliamentary Libs given that this claim is mostly being put by Tim Wilson and James Paterson who won their way through preselection by trumpeting their own unbreakable commitments to freedom and individual choice; but alas neither man said a peep through all of the pandemic thuggery and ‘greatest inroads on our civil liberties in three centuries’, not a whisper even against lockdowns, mandates, police brutality or anything at all that might put them offside with then prime minister Morrison so I’m afraid ‘concerned about freedom’ is not a notion we can today associate with these politicians.) Anyway, they go on to diagnose that the youth vote problem relates mostly to home ownership. Or rather the comparative lack of it amongst today’s young and how much harder it is these days to get into the home ownership game than it was a generation or two ago. And so, what the Libs need to do to win back the youth vote is to enact policies that make it easier for the later millennials and Gen Zs to buy their own homes.

In other words, this claim boils down to the view that home is where the votes are.  And going down this road will bring home the electoral bacon. Because voting begins at home. Hence these sort of policies will be home runs in shifting the youth vote. Just do a bit of ‘how to make house buying cheaper’ homework and then the Libs will take home the votes. And if they don’t go hard or go home in this way, well, it will come home to roost. You get the idea. Cutting a few tens of thousands of dollars off the cost of a home – heck, make it a few hundreds of thousands off by imagining what we know will never happen – or opening up a portion of a person’s superannuation contributions to buy a house is going to turn the under-30s into the praetorian guard of the Liberal party as we on the right-of-centre home in on renewed electoral dominance. Something like that.

Well, not to be overly blunt about this but the claim is massively overstated, verging on the laughable. Let me be clear. I don’t mean that these ‘make it easier to buy houses’ policy ideas are bad ideas. They’re not.  As second-order policy objectives they’re good ideas. What I think is wholly wrong-headed is the notion that it is the increased cost of housing that is costing the Libs the youth vote (and if you buy the whole line of thinking then also what is making fewer of the young shift right as they get older).  Frankly, it’s balderdash to suggest this is what has turned the young unusually left when the main cause is staring you in the face. It’s known as the complete capture of education by the political left. The Jesuits wanted a boy till he was eight (perhaps I was infelicitous in how I phrased that) to give you a good Catholic. We give our kids to an education system that is more intent on lefty indoctrination than teaching maths, English, science or facts. You see it with NSW having the world’s fastest-falling school results and Australia languishing below Kazakhstan. In universities, where I work, viewpoint diversity (i.e. having even a few right-of-centre conservatives) is collapsing. If the young are unusually left it’s because they’ve had left-wing views (some verging on the ridiculous and more than a few anti-science and most all in line with left-wing dogma) rammed down their throats from the age of five till they finish university at 21 or 22. And worst of all, during nine years of Coalition governments until Mr Albanese the lefty takeover of the education system got worse every year. Nor did the Libs do anything to try to fix the universities (just ask Peter Ridd). As Mark Steyn always says, ‘everything is downstream of culture’. But the so-called ‘moderate’ wing of the Libs doesn’t want to fight on that front. Too hard, or is it because they actually agree with Labor?

Instead, they look for some purely economic explanation, thereby caving in and implicitly adopting a pseudo-Marxist worldview while ignoring the elephant in the room (home?). Heck, even if one opted to play this game totally on the Wilson/Paterson home turf, we might ask why the Libs oversaw the democratic world’s highest per capita immigration (because that, you know, affects housing costs).

Of course, the answer is that GDP is a bogus measure and that mass immigration automatically keeps GDP looking good when what really matters is GDP per person – on which measure Australia has not done well of late and no better than no-immigration Japan and worse than almost-no-immigration Switzerland.

That’s what’s known as a home truth.