Deciding to Run: Overview
Federal politics, as it turns out, is not a young person’s game. The average age at which MPs in our group entered public life was 47. Most came to politics after a generation of building a career and often raising a family. They were well-established, and on the whole, most felt that life was good.
Then, a moment arrived that many described as unexpected – they were approached to stand for federal office. In this group, only a handful sought the nomination on their own. All of the others were asked.
Just as there was little in common in their backgrounds, there was no singular pattern to the MPs’ expressed reasons for running. Yet notwithstanding this great range of motivations, there is a strong collective narrative expressed by the majority of the MPs we interviewed: the paradox between their self-described feeling of being an “outsider” on one hand, and their significant experience within their communities on the other.