A new survey shows that young Australian men are too afraid to speak their minds publicly. Pundits wonder why, despite being the most popular party in the country, they don’t see many One Nation signs as you would expect in the lead-up to the Victorian election.
Is it any wonder?
A 37-year-old man accused of violently bashing a One Nation volunteer outside his Torquay home has been remanded in custody until next year following his first court appearance.
KJ Seumalu appeared before Magistrate John Lesser on Tuesday for a brief five-minute filing hearing. Sporting a shaved head with a long curly mullet, the accused rested his head against the dock wall and remained silent throughout proceedings, flanked by two Victoria Police officers.
The court was told he suffers from high blood pressure, while he self-reported, without a medical diagnosis, symptoms of anxiety and depression. He also has histories of substance abuse and alcohol misuse. His defence indicated he is undergoing withdrawal from methamphetamine.
Police allege Seumalu and a 14-year-old boy attended a Scorpio Street residence armed with a “blunt weapon” and assaulted the 60-year-old volunteer, leaving him bloodied and bruised more than a week later. He remains in a serious condition in hospital.
The pair had allegedly walked roughly one kilometre along the Surf Coast Highway after failing a breath test, during which he smashed his own car window and police impounded the vehicle. On their hike back to town they spotted an election sign for One Nation candidate Anna Malcolm on the victim’s back fence and went the bash.
One Nation Victorian leader Warren Pickering insisted he was “confident” the assault was politically motivated. Victoria Police detectives have stated they are not treating the incident as a politically motivated attack. No one believes them. When a man and a boy allegedly walk a kilometre, spot a One Nation sign, and then bash the volunteer who put it up, the political motive is the only one that makes sense. The police denial is the standard institutional reflex: anything that might complicate the narrative that One Nation voters are the real threat must be waved away.
This is the climate in which a new McKinnon Index survey of 4,273 people, conducted by Roy Morgan in July, finds that young Australian men have lost faith in the system. Less than half believe people are free to express their political opinions.
Overall, trust in federal politicians fell 5.4 points to 30.5 per cent, trust in political parties fell 6.8 points to 24.4 per cent, and trust in the federal government fell 4.5 points to 33.1 per cent. […]
The biggest changes in the data over the past year occurred in young men, whose support for democracy fell 10.3 points to 56.1 per cent.
49.8% of young men said they believe people can freely express their political opinions, down 22.8 points. The 2026 results were the same for young women, down 13.9 points over the past 12 months.
Asked whether “extreme measures such as violence can sometimes be necessary to advance a cause you care about”, 27.5 per cent agreed, up 8.2 points since the 2025 survey.
While it is terrifying that so many support violence to advance a cause, it should also be no surprise. To borrow a favourite phrase of the left, ‘a riot is the voice of the unheard’. When the uniparty establishment responds to every legitimate grievance with more censorship, more ‘hate speech’ laws and more institutional gaslighting, some of the unheard will eventually stop asking politely. The survey also found that for all 18-to-24-year-olds, the proportion who feel that people like them have a say in government fell from 58.8 per cent to 47.9 per cent. Only 54.3 per cent of them agreed democracy is preferable to other systems, compared with 91.9 per cent of those aged 65 and above.
Former Victorian deputy premier John Thwaites, interim executive chair at McKinnon, said that political leaders needed to regain the trust of the Australian public.
“People need to know their voice matters. They also need to see leaders acting with integrity, keeping their promises and delivering outcomes that make a difference to their lives,” he said.
Is it any wonder young people are disillusioned with democracy, when the uniparty establishment only ever wants to punish them with more and more censorship, especially online? The results come after tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in August to demand freedom of speech in response to an avalanche of new ‘hate speech’ and prohibited hate group laws. Those laws were sold as necessary to protect social cohesion. What they have produced is a generation that no longer believes it is free to speak, and a growing minority that no longer believes democracy is worth preserving.
Does anyone think that’s remotely ‘social cohesion’?
If the Albanese government really wants to ‘cool the political temperature’, they should take their suffocating gag of censorship off people’s mouths. Instead, they double down on the very measures that make ordinary Australians afraid to put a sign on their nature strip or say what they think in public. The bashing in Torquay is not an isolated incident of random violence. It’s the predictable outcome of a political culture that treats certain voters as legitimate targets and then pretends not to notice when the targets get hit.
Young men can see it. That is why fewer of them believe they are free to speak, and why more of them are starting to wonder whether the system that keeps silencing them is worth defending.
