It’s been a dire few weeks for Australia’s conservatives. On the weekend in the electorate of Aston in eastern Melbourne, the Liberal Party created history by being the first opposition party in a hundred years to lose a by-election to an incumbent government. This humiliating loss comes only a week after defeat in the New South Wales state election. No state in mainland Australia now has a Liberal government.

These results are consistent with the party’s overall decline. In Western Australia, for example, the Liberals barely exist: down to two seats -- victims of the “the most decisive [loss] at any…election since Federation.” In Victoria, the party has been out of office for 20 of the last 24 years and holds just three of the 26 federal seats in what will soon be our largest city.

Not everyone is pessimistic. According to former Prime Minister John Howard, “Labor’s dominance is brittle”. In his view, the NSW loss is nothing more than a conventional “time for a change” and is ar from indicative of any broader trends.

Other conservatives decry the Liberals’ lack of principle. The results would have been different if the party had embraced a genuine conservatism, they contend. “Go woke. Go broke” is their catch cry.

This is wrong. Indeed, it was only last November when much the same discussion was had after the Liberals’ loss in Victoria. It was the party’s third straight defeat coming only a term after they adopted a “law-and-order” program and were routed.

The party is in the midst of a schism between purist true believers and pragmatists who argue that the party’s only hope is embracing left-liberalism. Authentic conservatives like Tony Abbott, Cory Bernardi, or Moira Deeming have been marginalised or hounded out. The candidate in Aston, Roshena Campbell, must have seemed ideal: a barrister, a woman with an Indian background, and a mother of three. And she lost. What can the party do?

There are deeper forces at work which make a Liberal revival unlikely.

The most important is demographic. The constituency on which the Coalition is based is dying out. As per the ALP-allied pollster Kos Samaras, the pillars upon which Australian conservatism was built (rurality, ethnicity and religion) are being eroded by a newly urban, cosmopolitan and non-Christian electorate.

As Samaras states, in contrast to America where “older, whiter, rural communities” provide an electoral basis for conservativism, this no longer holds here. In Victoria, for example, 78 percent of the population lives in Melbourne. This is a scenario that is similar in all the other Australian states except Queensland and Tasmania. The largely rural Apple Isle is the only state with a Liberal government.

And the further right they go, the more the pool of supporters shrinks. As Samaras notes of the failures of One Nation, their main constituents are over 50, white and male -- “not a growing bunch”. As he observes elsewhere, they’re a group that’s “less and less prominent” in each and every election.

Meanwhile the number of young cosmopolitans is growing. They despise conservatives and vote accordingly. Indeed, centre-right support among the young “has fallen to historic lows” with only one in four voters under 40 opting for the Liberal-National Coalition. Gen Z voters, those born after 1996, vote at a two-in-three rate for the ALP or the Greens; only a quarter choose the Coalition.

In New South Wales Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) are now the dominant voting bloc in many key electorates. In Parramatta, for example, their “share of the voting population has reached 48.5 percent”, while “every electorate in western Sydney…has an average age below the statewide average”. This may explain the ALP’s dominance in Sydney and Melbourne.

Indeed, over the last decade the Millennial vote has risen from “17.9 percent of the NSW voting age population [to] 28 percent”. At the other end of the spectrum, seniors have dwindled from “53 percent of the voting age population…to 38.8 percent.” This trend holds across all our urban areas, with the Liberals only holding 14 of the 79 seats within Australia’s capital cities.

In previous eras younger cohorts aged into conservatism. This no longer seems to be the case. As writers like Ed West have noted, the young are starting out as left-liberals and staying there. According to one recent study, 35-year-olds in the US and the UK are “by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history.”

This is not to dismiss other factors. Uber-liberal social trends like transgenderism and a left-liberal education system have plainly pushed the populace leftward. So has an economic system that has rendered housing unobtainable and thus the presence of things that tend to make people conservative: like a mortgage, parenthood and children.

Yet these are not the primary problems. The primary problem for the right is demographic. It’s the diversity that is ostensibly our greatest strength -- and which the Liberal, as the traditional party of government, have overwhelmingly overseen -- that has rendered them unelectable.

This is something observed abroad- what American Ronald Brownstein dubbed the “coalition of the ascendant”. Take the dominance of the Labor Party in Western Sydney and Melbourne. Or the voting patterns of Chinese Australians. This is a group that was assumed to be “natural Liberals”, yet overwhelmingly sides with the ALP.

Thus in what is one of history’s darker ironies, the Liberal Party is being washed away by the demographic wave that it initiated. Until the party reckons with this reality there are only two possible choices: election via left-liberalism or permanent irrelevance.