The Forgotten People’s Children (1945–1975)

Episode 1 begins in 1945, at the moment the Liberal Party of Australia was formed in the shadow of war, reconstruction, and social upheaval. It explores how a party founded in the name of The Forgotten People initially spoke not only to families and small business owners, but to the aspirations of a rising post-war generation.

In the three decades that followed, young Australians benefited from extraordinary social mobility. Home ownership expanded rapidly, universities opened to broader sections of society, wages rose, and the promise of a stable, prosperous future felt attainable. The Liberal Party governed through much of this period, presenting itself as the custodian of opportunity, stability, and national progress. For a time, its message resonated with the young — or at least with the conditions that shaped their lives.

But beneath that surface alignment, tensions were already forming.

As Australia moved into the 1960s and early 1970s, generational expectations began to change faster than political instincts. The expansion of higher education created a more questioning, politically aware youth. Cultural authority weakened. Deference declined. Issues of civil liberties, war, race, gender, and personal freedom moved from the margins to the centre of political life. The Vietnam War and conscription became defining experiences for a generation — not as abstract policy debates, but as deeply personal questions of power, choice, and legitimacy.

This episode traces how the Liberal Party struggled to adapt to these shifts. While it had once benefited from youth aspiration, it increasingly found itself on the wrong side of youth experience. Its leadership, instincts, and language remained anchored in an earlier moral and social order, even as young Australians began to see politics less as protection of stability and more as a contest over justice, voice, and autonomy.

Importantly, Episode 1 does not argue that the Liberal Party “lost the youth vote” overnight, nor that it was uniquely responsible for the upheavals of the era. Instead, it makes a more difficult claim: that the foundations of today’s under-35s disengagement were laid early, in the party’s formative decades, when it failed to fully reconcile liberal conservatism with the realities of generational change.

The Forgotten People’s Children begins to answer the central question of the series: how an eighty-year divorce between the Liberal Party and young Australians took shape — not through a single policy failure or election loss, but through a slow accumulation of distance, misunderstanding, and missed adaptation.

It also asks a harder question, one that will echo through every episode that follows: if the disconnect began at the very moment the party was defining itself, can it ever truly be repaired? Or has the Liberal Party’s relationship with under-35s always been conditional — dependent on economic circumstances and social norms that no longer exist?

Episode 1 lays the historical groundwork for the series, arguing that to understand why young Australians have turned away from the Liberal Party in the 21st century, we must first understand how — and when — the bond was first strained in the 20th.