In the lead up to the 2025 Federal Election, upstart spoke to first-time voters to better understand their experience as they prepared for the polls. Our Voter Voices vox pops found that first-time voters faced a variety of different challenges. Although some of the voters we spoke to felt prepared, we saw a large majority expressing feelings of uncertainty and nervousness—or even a total lack of interest as soon as the election is mentioned. Many were also unsure of who to vote for and were overwhelmed at the thought of informing themselves on party policies. Some even said they found it easier to just vote the same as their family.

But why are first-time voters struggling to engage in Australian politics? To investigate this further, we spoke to an array of people working to lift the barriers facing the new generation of voters.

Ella Robinson, a VCE Global Politics teacher, experiences first-hand how young voters understand the Australian political system. Working as a teacher at Strathcona Girls Grammar, Robinson tells upstart that her students know who they want to vote for but are less confident about how to fill out ballot sheets and understanding where their votes ultimately go.

Whilst working as a VCE politics teacher, have you noticed a lack in confidence amongst your pupils who were first-time voters?

Lack in confidence is an interesting one because, to give you some context and this is where teachers sort of have a varied experience. I work at an all-girls school and depending on things like socioeconomic background and cultural background, you will find kind of varying wells of interest and engagement with politics in general.

I think when it comes to the idea of political confidence … I’m ten years out of school and something I notice between myself and the people I went to school with when we were in year 12, and the young people I’m working with now is that there is such a political presence on social media. They’re a lot more confident with the nature of the parties or the idea of like preference deals or policies or all that sort of stuff. So, in a way they’re good with what people are selling, I suppose.

Their uncertainty comes down to the actual process of voting. So, little things like explaining to them you vote for your representative, and the result of that vote then contributes to which party goes into power and who is selected as prime minister. But in terms of being able to engage with the political process through voting, they’re quite confident with it.

At Strathcona Girls Grammar, as part of our pastoral program we get students in 11 to enrol to vote. We show them how to do it. I think that it helps. Even just the breakdown of the House of Representatives versus the Senate, who votes for senators, like why is there such a difference in numbers? If we’re looking at confidence in terms of who’s doing what, they’re pretty good. But, if you said where does your vote go, I’m not sure they could totally tell you and I think that’s something that, certainly in Victoria, we’re really trying to work on in politics education.

Where do you find that most of your students get their political information?

Again, it varies. I’ve taught at a couple different schools with very different socio-economic contexts. The broad answer is social media, of course, and I think the rise of TikTok has been quite enormous certainly in Australia.

The other part of it, of course, is their parents. That is informed by a whole variety of factors like socio-economic standing, culture, ethnic tradition, experiences and familiarity with the Australian political system. Especially for newly arrived and migrant families. Employment and education levels within the home and willingness to talk politics comes out a little bit as well.

They’re probably the big two. Also, around election time, because so many young people get public transport to school or walk to school through public thoroughfares, it’s really interesting chatting with young people about the election material that is handed to them.

Are you finding that your VCE students are more engaged with American politics compared with Australian?

Oh, 100 percent. Like, we have more protections in place, so the Australian political system tries to make itself controversy-proof. The closest you can sort of get is when like someone in the Senate does something outlandish, we can talk about that.

I spent a fair chunk of time today talking about Donald Trump yet again. I think that is unfortunately, relevant to who’s in power.

I started teaching at the end of a Trump presidency and then now it’s Trump’s comeback. It feels like no one talks about America as much when they’re just puttering along. But the scale of political decisions in America and the lack of protection there, I think does make it more engaging. Also, because it’s what you see on the news. If you flick on the news tonight, generally not always, but generally a US political story will run first.

I think as much as people can view of likes of Pauline Hansen, Jacqui Lambie, Clive Palmer as odd bods, they build up a greater level of public engagement or public interest because they are more like the outlandish US politicians that we see.

I think Australia is very lucky, we have a very vigorous democratic system. And, when democracy works well, it should be kind of boring.

Do you find that during an election year you have to vary the way you’re teaching, or does it remain consistent across all years?

Yeah, I think it’s definitely the latter. The game with politics teachers is that you constantly want the students to be guessing and so sometimes that means holding back on particular things. It’ll be very, very rare for a teacher to give a personal political opinion in the classroom. But, obviously because we’re studying politics, that’s the flip side of it, is that we have to talk about those political opinions. We have to talk about why politicians and parties have the policies, agendas and approaches that they do.

So, in terms of an approach, I suppose you’re just more consciously posing to kids “why do you think politicians have established this policy”, “who are they trying to represent?” and “how are they doing this effectively?”.

Something I talk about a lot is that something doesn’t have to sit right with you or be agreeable or in some circumstances, depending on your perspective, be ethical for it to be good politics. We have to be able to see the bigger operations here because, Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese obviously have the same overarching goal, which is to be prime minister, but their goals are different by virtue of the fact that their parties have different objectives. So how can we look at “okay well this is effective because they’re achieving what they want to achieve, but is that best for the country? Let’s find some evidence to back that up or to challenge it”.

And really taking that bigger picture approach is probably what most politics teachers do across the board, but it’s definitely more amplified during an election year.

Do you think there are improvements that the Australian government could make that would make first-time voters more engaged?

I think, actually, just a bit of the old classic infomercial, or something on social media … saying, “remember, you don’t vote for the prime minister, you vote for your local representative”. I’ve had conversations with people my age who don’t know that and they’ve been voting for 10 years. I think going, okay, social media does have a really big presence. Let’s use that.