The following is a speech given at the ACT Young Liberal Ball on the themes of youth and national identity.
It is customary for Vice-Presidents during our ball to make an address on an area of policy or values of interest to them. So tonight, I want to speak to you about something that I believe undergirds all policy debates, something that sits not just at the surface of public life, but at its very foundation. That issue is national identity and youth.
An anecdote often brought up on our side of politics is the 1933 Oxford Union ‘King and Country’ debate. The motion before the house was this:
‘That this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and Country.’
It passed – 275 votes to 153. Now, we know the end of that story. Just a few short years later, the young men of Britain did in fact fight, for their King, for their country, for civilisation itself. But the motion wasn’t just an historical embarrassment, it was a warning. Because what it revealed, even then, was a generation adrift from identity, from belonging, from a national story. And friends, today that same tide is rising again. Recent research from the Institute of Public Affairs shows that less than half of young Australians would stay and fight if our nation found itself in a situation like Ukraine. Less than half.
The natural instinct of the conservative is to chastise these young people, and remind them why they should care about their country, this is a good instinct but one we ought to suppress. The reason they don’t want to serve isn’t because they’re lazy. Or cowardly. Or unserious. It’s because they feel no ownership of the nation they’re being asked to defend.
People do not fight for places they do not belong to.
They do not serve what they’ve been taught to hate.
And they will not sacrifice for a country they no longer recognise as theirs.
There are three main forces behind this crisis: migration, housing, and national neglect.
Migration, at its current scale, has weakened the shared narrative of Australian identity. Now immigration has in the past been a strength of this country, but strength without balance leads to collapse.
Without a strong national culture to integrate into, what results is not unity, but fragmentation. Not harmony, but parallel societies and an island of strangers.
On Housing, the simple truth is this: young people feel like they own nothing and so they feel they belong to nothing. You can’t ask someone to defend a homeland they have no chance of inheriting. The nation’s policy settings have created a generation of renters in property, in purpose and in spirit.
Finally, national consideration itself has become taboo. Even our own institutions (schools, media, universities, etc) speak of Australia not with pride, but with guilt. Our holidays are questioned. Our flag is debated. Our history is rewritten. Patriotism is treated as a punchline.
Ultimately, no nation can survive if it believes its founding to be immoral, for its conception to be a sin. If this trend continues, what remains? What are we offering young Australians to believe in?
Now some might say, ‘Well, Jordan, isn’t this a bit of nationalism? Isn’t this outside the classical Liberal brief?’
But here’s the truth: as Liberals, we care about national identity because we care about the individual.
Because individuals don’t float in midair. They belong to and are shaped by things outside themselves.
They are formed by the families, the institutions, the nation that surrounds them. If we want a free people, then we must give them a reason to use their liberty. If we want a just society, then we must maintain that society to begin with. And if we want civic duty, moral courage, and public virtue, then we must recover national meaning not as nostalgia in Instagram edits but as inheritance.
And we know this is possible. It is not fantasy.
Other nations are already doing it.
We’ve seen in these countries that young people can be reached. That national renewal is not a lost cause, but we’ve also seen the cost of failure. In places like Britain, national identity has been eroded to the point where often the only common cause is grievance. If we follow that path, we risk becoming a country where the only thing that unites people is their disdain for it.
Now I am not saying that we ought to import political frameworks from the United States or any other country for that matter. Australians will only accept, and only deserve, Australian solutions to their uniquely Australian problems. But I believe that as Young Liberals we must do better.
We must fight to make our movement, one that helps restore public life to its purpose, not just as a stage for political theatre, but as a place where the soul of a nation is cultivated, defended, and renewed. We need to advocate for policies that honour citizenship, home ownership, shared story, and generational continuity. We need to foster a politics that says to young Australians:
‘This is your country. You belong here. It is worth defending. And it is waiting for you to take it up and make it better.’
And so, I leave you with this challenge: Let us be the generation that makes our movement more than a machine for elections; let it be a forge for leadership, a school of citizenship, and a source of real meaning for those who join it. Let us not be a movement in which members must be ‘recruited’ and ‘attendees’ must be ‘whipped’ to meetings.
Let us build a Young Liberal movement that is energetic, attractive, and serious. One that leaves its members not just politically active, but personally formed with deeper skills, greater wisdom, and a clearer understanding of their country, their history, and their values.
I will close by introducing a man who has been a guiding force in our party, someone who understands that political leadership is not merely about managing the present, but about stewarding a nation through history.
It has been said: ‘The standard we walk past is the standard we accept.’ And tonight, I say to you all: we must not walk past the disinheritance of our young people. We must not walk past the drift into national amnesia. We must not walk past the slow death of meaning in our institutions, in our communities, and in our culture.
Instead, we must stand firm. We must say clearly: this is our country, our home, and we will fight for it, shape it, and pass it on better than we found it. And now friends, it is my great honour to once again introduce a former Prime Minister, a statesman, a warrior for truth, tradition, and the Australian way of life.
Patriots, please welcome, The Honourable Tony Abbott.
Jordan Abou-zeid is the Vice-President of the ACT Young Liberals and co-founder of The Recharge, a national conference for young Christians interested in public life. Twitter & Facebook
