Australia’s 48th parliament is the most diverse in the nation’s history, at least by conventional measures. The female, Indigenous, ethnic and LGBT+ communities have never had so many MPs and senators advocating their cause. Yet polling consistently shows voters have never felt so disenfranchised.
Measures of trust and satisfaction in elected representatives are at record lows amid rising anti-politician sentiment and record-low support for the major parties.
For a substantial cohort of disenchanted voters, the proclaimed diversity of parliament is bunkum. One Nation’s attacks on the so-called uniparty are gaining traction, despite the stark differences between a dreamily progressive Labor government and an increasingly hard-nosed conservative opposition.
It suggests the most important political divide is not between left and right but between the politicians and the people they claim to represent.
Yet by less fashionable measures of diversity – such as age, education and career paths – parliamentarians increasingly conform to type. More than 80 per cent of MPs and senators are university graduates compared with just 26 per cent of Australians at the 2021 census.
The focus of their studies leans heavily towards the arts, including law and economics. Only a handful of parliamentarians have engineering qualifications, which may help explain Canberra’s recurring naivety about energy and infrastructure.
Rebuilding an energy system from scratch demands more than a passing knowledge of applied science, yet Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s academic background is in economics. MPs and senators with trade certificates are few and far between. Which leads us to the frightening conclusion that most of the politicians who legislated targets for the transformation of our energy system couldn’t be trusted to change a light bulb.
Parliament, in other words, has become a hotbed of intellectuals, defined by Thomas Sowell as “a social class of persons whose economic output consists of generalised ideas”, as opposed to those with useful skills that can be used to actually fix things. To the extent that they are problem solvers, their inclination is towards social problems – fairness, equality, diversity and the like – rather than practical problems such as saving for retirement or addressing the cost of living.
Politicians also are concentrated in a relatively narrow stage of life, from their 30s to their mid-50s, when household finances tend to be dominated by earnings and mortgages rather than accumulated assets.
As the giant cohort of Baby Boomers retires, the number in parliament is slipping. In 2013, when Tony Abbott became prime minister, 48 per cent of parliamentarians were born before 1965. In today’s parliament, the proportion of Baby Boomers and older cohorts has fallen to 20 per cent, compared with 30 per cent in the general population.
The sole representative of the Silent Generation, those born before 1946, is the magnificently un-silent Bob Katter.
The ascendancy of the narrow graduate class has encouraged a political focus that is preoccupied with intentions and abstractions – climate targets and gender identity – while paying less attention to practical consequences: cost, feasibility and the disruption imposed on ordinary lives.
On the rare occasions when the preoccupations of the political class are put directly to a popular vote, as with the Indigenous voice referendum, the gulf between Canberra and the country becomes impossible to ignore.
Yet the political class has become adept at getting its way by stealth, covering its tracks with feel-good words. The cumulative frustration over changes that most voters abhor being made without consultation – let alone a vote – is fuelling the rise of populism.
The Australian Election Survey conducted after the 2025 election revealed that the conditions were ripe for political revolt. Barely one in three Australians trusts the people in government, compared with more than half in 2007.
The proportion of the population that agreed that “People in government look after themselves” has risen from about 40 per cent late last century to about 75 per cent.
None of this would surprise American political theorist Hanna Pitkin, whose 1957 distinction between descriptive representation (who representatives are) and substantive representation (what representatives do) serves as a useful correction for identity politics.
In The Concept of Representation (1967), she argued that representation was fundamentally about acting in the interests of the represented, not merely resembling them.
In a descriptive sense, women were woefully under-represented in the blokey parliament elected in 1996, in which four out of five MPs and senators were male and only one parliamentarian was openly gay – the newly elected Greens senator Bob Brown.
Yet around twice as many voters trusted this predominantly straight white male parliament to do the right thing, suggesting the quality of political representation should be judged by the content of one’s character, not the colour of one’s skin or one’s inherited chromosomes.
The lesson for the Liberal Party is that it should reject the persistent demand for sex-based quotas and focus on recruiting members from a broader constituency of working Australians. Neither should it become obsessed with ethnic cohorts. We hardly need opinion polling or focus groups to tell us that the No.1 issue for most Australians, whether born here or migrants, is the cost of living.
If the party wants a targeted recruitment drive, it should target people who genuinely support Liberal values and have succeeded at something other than politics – not those whose career trajectory runs from a politics or communications degree to a staffer’s desk and thence up the party ladder.
It would eschew identity politics in all its forms, recognising that it has become a gateway drug to narcissism, encouraging politicians to lean into their personal narrative rather than quotidian concerns of the anonymous Australians who sent them to Canberra.
The more parliament sees itself as an assembly of identities, the less capable it becomes of speaking and governing in the national interest. The exhibitionist displays we sometimes see in the Senate, in which the chamber becomes a bear pit for competing grievances, serve as a warning for where this leads.
It calls for a return to humility – a dying virtue in contemporary politics – that underpins an equally unfashionable notion of public service.
Parliament will never regain public trust if it acts as what Edmund Burke describes as “a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests”. Instead, it must pursue a higher goal: “a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole”.
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