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.

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