Push to dump group voting tickets in Victorian upper house
- Penny Hoffmann
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
The Greens have renewed their calls to change the voting system for the Victorian Legislative Council.
Victorian Greens MP Dr Tim Read has renewed a push to dump group voting tickets for Victoria's upper house, following the announcement of several new parties that intend to direct preferences from left-wing voters to right-wing parties.
Last week, Avi Yemeni, a former IDF soldier and Australian correspondent for Canada’s Rebel News, explicitly announced his plans to create a political party named “Free Palestine” but redirect party votes toward right-leaning parties, including One Nation.
Yemeni is the second person to utilise the group voting ticket system for this election, remarking that he was inspired by anti-lockdown campaigner Monica Smit.
In February, Smit advised that she would run under the party name “Save the Environment Party”, but funnel votes to right-wing parties.
Yemini also recently announced the creation of the political party 'Muslim Votes Matter', where he told his YouTube audience that it will redirect votes to One Nation.
Late last month, the Greens released a statement warning that Victoria keeping the group voting loophole “is allowing extremists to shamelessly exploit the system and deceive voters in order to elect far-right MPs to the parliament at the November election”.
6 News chief anchor Leo Puglisi spoke with Victorian Greens MP Dr Tim Read about his reaction to the Free Palestine Party.
“My reaction to that was at first to roll my eyes, because Avi is a notorious attention seeker,” he said.
“But it’s also important to point out that Victoria’s upper house is uniquely prone to manipulation of this sort.”
The group voting ticket system is one in which voters can only select one party above the line on the upper house ballot paper. Their preferences then follow the order of the party's ticket.
The majority of this preference coordination, sometimes known as “preference whispering”, is actioned by Australian electoral campaigner Glenn Druery. His Minor Party Alliance allocate the preferences in their group voting tickets to each other over larger parties to ensure their collective votes can accumulate together. This guarantees that some of the members of the Minor Party Alliance will be elected, even if it is disproportionate to their individual votes.
The group voting ticket system is currently only used in two of Australia’s jurisdictions: the Victorian Legislative Council and the councillor ballot for Melbourne City Council local government elections.
“The idea is that you set up a party with a left-leaning name to attract left-leaning voters, and you direct their preferences to right-leaning parties,” Read said.
“This is something that might not do much in a normal upper house election, like a federal Senate election where the percentages would be very low and most people would see through it.”
“But with Victoria's group voting system, you can get in if you've got multiple micro parties: they can all trade preferences, and you can end up getting one of them elected in each upper house region.”
When asked if he had any recent indication that the Labor Party would be willing to remove Victoria’s group voting system, Read said that WA’s “most bizarre” election result in 2021 should have been enough for Labor to remove the system much earlier.
“A discussion of group voting is never complete without talking about the most bizarre result of all time in WA, where the Daylight Saving Party guy got elected with 98 votes and had to fly back from Seattle to take his seat.”
“He wasn't expecting to win, and that prompted WA to get rid of group voting.”
“It’s these sorts of results that should have prompted Labour in Victoria to get rid of it eight years ago. But it's been far too convenient for them so far.”
“But it will bite them in the bum in this election.”
Read told Puglisi that the Victorian Greens’ proposal for what the upper house should look like, keeping in mind the limited time until the state election, is changing how the members are voted in, as opposed to a move to a statewide system (which requires a referendum).
“I can’t imagine any government bringing a referendum any time soon,” he said.
“But it’s very easy to write a short amendment to the Electoral Act, which would fix [the problem of voters not controlling who their preferences elect].”
