This article was originally published on Upstart on September 25, 2025.

When thousands of people were walking over Sydney Harbour Bridge in a march for Palestine, the sheer number of young faces in the crowd reminds us how many young Australians are passionate about political issues. But we also know that young people feel increasingly disconnected or uninterested in formal politics, such as elections, and feel that parliament doesn’t represent them.

Dr Jill Sheppard, a political scientist from The Australian National University, tells upstart it’s important to distinguish “interested in politics” and “interested in parties and elections”.  For example, young people often participate in informal politics through rallies and protests, either on a university campus, in city centres or across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. However, studies show that if elections were voluntary, only 45 percent of young Australians would vote.

“Any sane politician looks at the Sydney Harbour Bridge march and feels a little less confident in the popularity of their current position,” Sheppard says.

The average age of an Australian Member of Parliament is 52.2, despite the median age of Australians being 39.6. There are, however, young people who still think it’s interesting and important to be engaged in political parties and processes. Who are they, and what drives them?

For some, it’s a social experience. Member of the Liberal party and biomedicine student at the University of Melbourne, Lachlan Greenwood, 20, tells upstart that he has been interested in politics since high school.

“Me and my mates, we’d always just chat about politics,” he says.

Having become a Liberal party member at university, he thinks joining a political party is important because you can influence the political system, build social connections and have “fun”.

However, when it comes to taking things a step further and actually running in elections, Sheppard says several factors stop young people.

“Most young people don’t have access to the time, money, and security that’s needed to have a confident crack at running for election,” she says.

Thanks to a previous engineering career, Dr Shawn Price, 31, was able to fund his campaign he stood for in the New South Wales Senate this year. Price tells upstart he became politically involved just four months before the election. At the time, he was working as an engineer for a bioenergy company and felt frustrated with the transition to green energy, thinking that when it happens it may already be too late.

“My political awakening was that without a paradigm shift in international cooperation, we’re headed towards a catastrophic event by the end of the century, [it] could be decades away or even sooner,” he says.

He decided to run for the office, acknowledging how small the chances were for him to win.

“[I] never really expected to win,” he says. “I knew that there was, like, a one percent chance that I would go absolutely viral, then I could win. But I knew that my strategy was to treat it as a marketing launch and that for 2028, I would actually go above the line.”

Being a candidate is expensive. Price says it cost him around $30,000 to run for the Senate. Max Dicks, 35, a locksmith and an independent candidate for the Victorian Senate in 2019 and 2022, spent between $10,000 and $15,000 on each campaign. He tells upstart it was too expensive for him to run for office this year.

“It’s a lot of work to be working full-time and trying to prepare a political campaign,” he says.

He ran twice and was unsuccessful both times, but says he just felt he needed to try.

Thomas Price

While Price and Dicks decided to go federal straight away, Thomas Prince, 35, from Bendigo, got a seat on the local council. It took him three tries to get it, but he tells upstart that he realised he loves Bendigo, and he loves people, so becoming a city councillor combines both.

“I try not to do too much of the tokenistic, standing in front of the supermarket, handing out flyers and forcing political conversations,” he says. “I don’t think people want that. I think people just want to see you in the community helping.”

Youth researcher for Life Patterns at The University of Melbourne, Dr Eric Fu tells upstart he’s noticed many young Australians are still passionate about participating in their local communities. But at some point, between local and federal politics, their enthusiasm is lost. Fu suggests it might be the “feeling of disconnect between politicians and the ordinary lives of Australian people”.

“There’s a kind of frustration with the mainstream politics in terms of whether the government and the politicians who are supposed to represent them in parliament actually have a firm understanding of their concerns,” he says.

Director of Monash Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice, Associate Professor Lucas Walsh tells upstart that there is a widening gap between young voters and their representatives in parliament.

“There’s been a move away from institutions in general,” Walsh says. “So, we see less memberships to political parties and unions.”

Former Greens party member and now Victorian Socialists sympathiser, Francois Van Kempen, 21, who became involved in politics at a young age, has also noticed this gap. When speaking to political club recruiters on campus, he says that some of them sound like “they think they’re a bit smarter than you”.

“There’s nothing wrong with using polysyllables, but you’ve got to speak to the person where they’re at,” he says.

Independent candidates feel this disconnect as well, and they have their own ideas of how to make the lives of regular Australians better. For example, Max Dicks names raising “emotional intelligence” as the central idea of his campaign.

“I think my focus would be on just being happy and making or helping facilitate Australians to be happy,” he says.

Shawn Price has a bigger plan than just becoming a senator. He wants to push a bill on the 77th seat in parliament, called a seat for humanity and make it a precedent for other countries.

“I realised that our policy and current international system is holding us back from solving all the global problems, not just the energy crisis or the climate crisis,” he says.

He wants a person in the Senate to “represent the interests of the entire human race and the entire planet”. But also says he’s passionate about science and wouldn’t like to make politics his main career.

“I’m really only running because I want to pass this one bill, create this new representation within national decision-making,” he says.

Bendigo councillor Thomas Prince prefers thinking of his local community rather than global issues. He says he didn’t become a councillor for money or to springboard his political career. Instead, he thinks bringing in parties makes local government more “divisive”.

“…it brings a lot of frustration, and it gives people a reason not to like us,” he says.

He thinks that with “every level you go up, you lose a bit of connection” with the people who voted for you. This is known as the paradox of power, as you rise in power it seems you can help more people, but in fact, you start to lose the connection with your voters and the skills that helped you achieve that position.

Young candidates spend their time and money hoping to represent young voters but it’s hard to do so if those voters don’t want to participate. Sheppard says this is very difficult to fix.

“It’s difficult to tell young people they should be interested in formal politics because the state of it all is pretty grim,” she says. “Middle aged politicians with extremely focus group tested lines afraid to say anything that will upset a single voter.”

For Sheppard, engaging young people can also come down to tone.

“The best thing governments and politicians can do is talk to young people without getting too cautious or too patronising.”