Howard's South Park pals

Young voters have flocked to the Prime Minister as the good times continue to roll, writes Caroline Overington

"The man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at 40 he has no head."
- Aristide Briand

IT is 100 years since Aristide Briand's expulsion from the French Socialist Party prompted him to utter words that have become part of the received wisdom of politics.

Before John Howard, the notion that young people leaned to the left was largely unchallenged. The youth vote was the dominant force that propelled Gough Whitlam into power in the 1972 "It's Time" election and stayed with Labor throughout the Hawke and Keating years.

By 2004, however, when Howard won his fourth election, the ground had shifted dramatically. Less than a third of young people -- 32 per cent -- voted for Mark Latham, while 41 per cent went with Howard.

Even allowing for the 17 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds who voted for the Greens, the uncomfortable truth for the Opposition was that, for the first time since reliable age-specific polling began, less than half of young people were voting for candidates from the Left.

Howard's policies were hardly tailored to young people. He spoke for the middle class, caring more for business than for endangered marsupials. Young people would be expected to work for the dole, and Howard was stridently opposed to student unionism, indeed to all compulsory unionism, and to the republic. Under Howard's Government, HECS fees have doubled. Yet Howard has, over the past 10 years, been utterly transformed in the eyes of the young. To the horror of many baby boomers, Howard's new constituency, the "young fogies", adore him the way their parents loved to smoke dope.

Howard's position as Prime Minister of choice for people aged 18 to 24 became apparent during the 1998 election when Labor arguably misread the mood of the electorate on such issues as immigration. Many voters, particularly in Queensland, abandoned the ALP (and the Nationals) for Pauline Hanson's One Nation. In the aftermath, some in Labor concluded that the result was an aberration but, in a Newspoll taken in June 1999, a year after the election, young people confirmed their preference for conservative politics. The Australian's political editor Dennis Shanahan wrote that the "young fogies" had poured across to the Coalition "and deserted Labor so dramatically that there has been a complete reversal of support for the ALP". "The youngest voters are now the Coalition's second-strongest area of support, behind its traditional power base of the over-50s," Shanahan noted.

The results were confirmed in the 2001 election when a Morgan poll found that 18 to 24-year-olds voting in that election gave Labor their primary vote at a rate of only 1.2 per cent more than the general population. By comparison, in 1990, young people gave Labor their primary vote by 10.4 per cent more than the general population.

In October 2004 -- the election that would give the Coalition historic control of both chambers -- the "young fogies" of generations X and Y again deserted Labor. Clive Bean of the Queensland University of Technology, one of the principal investigators in the Australian Election Study of voting behaviour conducted after each poll, told The Australian in 2005 that it might have been the first time more young people voted Liberal than Labor. The trend was particularly noticeable among young men, 49 per cent of whom voted for Howard, compared with only 28 per cent who voted Labor. In the 25 to 30 age group, an overwhelming 62 per cent of men voted for Howard, compared with 27 per cent for Latham.

The rise of conservative youth under Howard mirrors a similar movement in the US, where blogger Andrew Sullivan coined the term "South Park Republicans" in 2001 to describe young iconoclasts who "see through the cant and the piety of the Left and cannot help giggling". The term comes from the anti-establishment television cartoon series South Park whose heroes are four, foul-mouthed fourth-graders who gleefully lampoon the sacred values of the Left.

In his US bestseller South Park Conservatives, Brian C. Anderson says the program is "the number-one example of the new anti-liberalism". He notes that the show's single black person is called Token. Anderson describes how the show lampoons the boomers, who championed individual happiness over familial responsibility and promoted no-fault divorce.

In Australia, recent studies have shown Australian young people reacting against the liberal-progressive values of their parents in much the same way. Clemenger BBDO's 2005 survey Tomorrow's Parents Today found that young people were significantly more conservative than their parents. They were more likely to volunteer, to give to charity and to go to church. They were also more likely to marry, and there is already evidence that they plan to have their children earlier.

According to Ian Manning of National Economics: "You do get the feeling that forgoing worldly ambition for the sake of having kids is gradually coming back into favour. In the past, people have said, 'Oh, I can't have a baby yet, I've got to pursue my career'. But maybe it's become socially acceptable to say, 'No, I'd rather have a family'."

The Democrats' 2005 youth poll, based on a survey that is distributed to secondary schools, TAFE, universities, youth, and church and community groups across Australia, found that 64 per cent of students viewed family as the most important issue in their lives, ahead of health, education and money. Compared with earlier polls, there was a substantial drop in the number who had tried marijuana (from 43 to 33 per cent in 10 years) and much less support for the decriminalisation of drugs. Young people were also increasingly backing the Howard Government's policy of mandatory detention for asylum-seekers, with support rising from 41 per cent in 2002 to 58 per cent in 2005.

Former Education Minister Brendan Nelson, who dealt every day with young Australians, is not surprised. He points to some of the obvious factors: the economy has boomed under Howard; there are plenty of new jobs, especially for young people; interest rates have stayed low; school retention rates have increased; and there are more opportunities for travel. Young people, in particular, have never had it so good.

During the 2004 election, some within Labor expressed the deluded hope that recruiting rock star Peter Garrett to stand as a Labor MP would appeal to young people, but Labor's Nicola Roxon disagreed. "We have to remember he was a hero when we were younger, so we think he has youth appeal, and it's true, to some extent, he does, but if you asked a 19-year-old, they might not even know who Midnight Oil was. He recently came to speak at a function for me, and he was fabulous, but the people who wanted to come were 40 and 50-year-old men. He gave a very passionate and interesting speech, and people were really engaged, so that really is our key. We've got a perfectly good message, if people listen to it."

Roxon's candid remarks illustrate Labor's critical failing over the past decade. While Howard has been promoting the benefits of a healthy economy, Labor has been diverted by issues such as the republic, the symbolism of Aboriginal reconciliation and opposition to the war in Iraq, which may be important to some young people but are low on their list of priorities.

In 1998, after Howard decided he would not support the Yes vote in the constitutional referendum for a republic, Labor decided to embarrass him by supporting the Yes vote. It provided backing to young republican stars, such as Jason Yat-Sen Li and the lipstick princess, Poppy King, and to the movement that adopted youth oriented slogans such as Give an Australian the Head Job and which distributed condoms marked Rooting for a Republic, in the hope they would appeal to young people. In the end, only 46.5 per cent of voters voted Yes to a republic and there was scant evidence that young people backed it more firmly than others.

Labor saw a chance to win back the young vote when Howard backed the US-led war in Iraq. In some of the largest demonstrations since the Vietnam War, young protesters led a cardboard puppet of Howard up the street making it lick the bottom of a cardboard George W. Bush. More than 25,000 students took part in the Books not Bombs protest. Yet, as the 2004 election showed, anti-war feeling did not translate into votes. It was another disappointment for Labor, after the Sorry Day march for Aboriginal reconciliation across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in May 2000, which delivered no measurable swing to Labor in the November 2001 election.

These carefully staged events were in any case aberrations to a general trend, in Australia and most other Western nations since the end of the Cold War, away from student and youth activism. The Palm Sunday peace marches, which once were dominated by young people, are essentially dead and even protests against voluntary student unionism in 2005 attracted nothing like the crowds of protesters that once routinely gathered on university campuses.

In part, that's because young people do not have time to paint slogans on to protest signs. They work an average of 20 hours a week, on top of full-time or part-time study, and they leave university with HECS debts worth $30,000 or more. Since the collapse of communism, young people are less likely to adopt the Marxist view that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. To them the fruit of capitalism is new cars, plasma TVs and trips overseas. They have grown up in an age of prosperity in which the welfare state appears redundant. A vibrant economy has emboldened young people to create small businesses of their own.

These factors have meant that Howard -- straight-laced, conservative Howard -- has been responsible for something that smells suspiciously like teen spirit. He has encouraged the young to rebel.

Extract from The Howard Factor - A Decade That Changed the Nation edited by Nick Cater and published today by Melbourne University Press. $29.95.

Hope from Downunder!

"The man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at 40 he has no head."

Those of us who grew up during the 70s were an exception, thanks to Jimmy Carter and his ilk. Younger voters supported Reagan by a margin of over 2-1 in 1984, and the same group (now in their 40s) provided President Bush his strongest support among any age group.

-Eric

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