Group Ticket Voting In Victoria Is Finally Gone!

Today is Victoria's first day since the mid-2000s without Group Ticket Voting in state elections.  Legislation to abolish the system received Royal Assent yesterday.  It could still in theory be challenged in court but I doubt that would go too well after the failed Bob Day federal challenge.

There's a saying that success has many fathers while failure is an orphan.  Meaning that when something good happens a lot of people suddenly want to claim the credit.  

Since group ticket voting was abolished in Victoria we've seen, for instance, GetUp! claiming partial credit for their petition which highlighted the recent attempt by Avi Yemini and others to register fake parties.  Yemini's defenders (including Topher Field in a ridiculous video where he abusively misunderstands comments to the Guardian by yours truly) have been out saying GetUp! and others who reacted were just "useful idiots" and their tactic with the fake parties was to generate exactly such outrage against group ticket voting to increase the chance of it being scrapped.  Well, to be useful idiots you firstly have to be useful so this suggests that GetUp! actually did do something after all.  I will say here that at least GetUp! only claimed partial credit while Yemini and co have had no compunction about claiming the lot.  But I'm not sure GetUp!'s petition with 22000+ "signatures" was ever even presented to anybody! I am nonetheless glad that they raised awareness of the issue.

While there is some history of opposition to GTV on the alternative/far right, Yemini and co were largely opportunistic blowins to a fight that has been going on for many years.  The share of credit they are claiming, for the sake of selling themselves to their flock, is excessive.  But did they help at all? I can't say for sure they didn't, without reading the minds of every single MP in Labor's caucus.  For sure I was also glad to use their efforts as yet another plank in the overwhelming case for getting rid of GTV.  

I suspect however that probably Labor had already decided to do the right thing and did a good job of not saying anything publicly to really confirm this, or that if Labor did waver, other factors such as the risk of Labor's second seats being wiped out if GTV was kept and the difficulty that posed for preselections were far more persuasive.  

After all fake parties like Free Palestine were more of a problem for the minor left parties than Labor (whose brand is in ordinary shape among people who care about the issue), and would probably not have polled much anyway (for all the noise about it Sack Dan Andrews polled less than 1%).  There would if needed have been serious campaigns to make voters aware that these parties were fake, and the distortion they would have caused by funnelling a few low-information votes to One Nation would be small compared to the damage caused when multiple more subtly misleadingly named parties feed more votes into a Druery party preference spiral.  Parties with misleading climate-related names have been very unsuccessful in the past.

Anyway I'm writing this post to celebrate the more than overdue end of Group Ticket Voting in Victorian state elections by thanking those who more clearly deserve it (even if some haven't supported scrapping GTV unconditonally) and also to add an account of my own involvement.  Apologies to those I miss in the first pass - the beauty of blog software being I can easily edit them in - but thanks to but not limited to the following:

* Antony Green, who has been raising the problem of preference harvesting for 30 years and even as it finally disappeared was writing excellent articles about it including this one with a great metric, the Defeated Leader Ratio.

* Other pseph colleagues who have long opposed GTV in Victoria, especially Ben Raue who has done so with considerable media cut-through.  I also mention coverage and/or submissions by Charles Richardson, William Bowe, Malcolm Baalman,  Vanessa Teague and colleagues, Adrian Beaumont, Henry Schlechta and others.  

* The Victorian Socialists for their very longstanding opposition on principle to GTV and refusal to play games under it.  Indeed in the 2018 campaign they were the only party that I saw doing anything remotely useful and consistent with their ideals on the issue.

* The Victorian Greens for consistently opposing GTV over the past two terms even when nobody else in either house would support their motions, but especially Tim Read.  Several Greens have spoken very well on this issue but Tim has been absolutely tireless on it, speaking about it by his count sixteen times way back to his debut speech and staging media stunts to highlight the complete absurdity of MLCs in effect buying a seat in parliament (if they happened to win the GTV lucky dip) for $55,000.  

* Those in the Coalition who opposed GTV strongly, in particular Evan Mulholland.  The Coalition's performance on GTV on the floor of the parliament in 2018-22 was (with some exceptions) in general not nearly what it should have been.  Evan came to the parliament with the experience of involvement in the 2016 repeal and with real passion for getting rid of group ticket voting and was a breath of fresh air on the issue.  It's actually not easy to drive reform from Opposition where a government needs your support as governments can easily interpret apparent support as a trap.  The Liberal Party's performance under all three leaders this term greatly improved in this term and several other opposition MPs also spoke very well on the need to scrap Group Ticket Voting.  (A few perpetuated the Sack Dan Andrews myth in so doing; I'll forgive them that.)

* The Victorian Electoral Matters committee in general for the very high quality and thoroughness of their investigations into the 2022 election and the reporting they produced with clear conclusions that GTV had got to go.  The 2024 Electoral Matters report - not just on this issue - is among the best of its type that I have seen.  

* Those within Labor who most strongly supported change.  I don't know who they are, but they do. 

* The other minor parties that took any kind of policy of fixing GTV at all to the 2022 election, however conditional and however they ended up voting on the recent motion given the lack of reform to the regions: One Nation (who also voted in favour of unconditional reform), Legalise Cannabis and (conditionally) Animal Justice Party.  

* Heston Russell and Chris Burson for what I see as a major contribution, the Angry Victorians sting video.  These ex-soldiers went behind enemy lines and blew up their own party's chances to bring back precious intel in the form of a video of Glenn Druery boasting, among other things, that he used the threat of cutting parties out of future preference deals to control crossbench votes on electoral reform on the floor of parliament. 

* Ben Schultz for the hilarious 2022 ratting on Druery that resulted in Animal Justice taking Druery network preferences and winning a seat from them but not giving anything back.  Among other things this probably prevented more Druery candidates being elected.  But also it helped expose what a joke GTV preference harvesting has long been and the shenanigans that are possible within it, and resulted in Druery whinging about how Schultz had ratted on the "family", sounding every bit like a spurned Mafia boss whinging that there is not enough honour among thieves.  

* All those whatever their politics who put in submissions to Electoral Matters, signed petitions, commented against group ticket voting on social media, were influenced in their votes by the issue, lobbied MPs, asked Daniel Andrews questions about it on Q&A (this happened!) and so on.  Especially noting that at least one campaigner out there was so devoted to this issue that they actually joined the ALP to drive change from within at branch level!  

* Media who have covered the Group Ticket Voting debate.  

My history with this issue

Now, about my own contributions.  Some have already given me a lot of credit for the kill and others would assign me none at all, but here are the facts.  I first became really interested in getting rid of Group Ticket Voting in the 2013 federal election campaign.  I'd been aware of preference harvesting as something that caused occasional awful results before that, but I hadn't really been engaged by it until I saw the problems close at hand, and I'd probably tended to think that the problem was parties making bad decisions and not the whole system itself.  The problem of preference harvesting really arrived fully fledged at the 2013 election with a big rise in the non-majors-and-Greens vote at that election. 

In my attempts (such as they were) to project that year's Senate race for Tasmania, I was aghast when I found that almost every party on the ballot had preferenced a well-known (but recently arrived in the state) anti-gay activist on the Family First ticket above at least one significant rival, creating a near-perfect preference spiral.  The election of Peter Madden in a state that had come a long way since being the last in the country to pass gay law reform by some margin would have been horribly embarrassing.  But to save the lazy and complacent Tasmanian left from itself yet again I had to tell people to vote for the Pirate Party, the Sex Party (whose candidate didn't even live in Tasmania and whose GTV choices were themselves pretty dubious) or to number 54 boxes. 54 was far and away the most candidates Tasmania had ever seen and the below the line voting rate was smashed.

Anyway, I managed to get some publicity beyond my own social media and Madden was stopped in the end by the Sex Party staying ahead of him while holding preferences that he needed, but it was much too close for comfort (under a thousand votes).  And I thought this sort of thing has to be stopped. Voters needed to be able to freely and easily vote for and preference the parties they liked without risk of electing a candidate they would find terrible just because their preferred party's operatives did stupid deals or lacked due diligence.  

This and the general 2013 GTV debacle led me to make submissions to JSCEM and appear in hearings that led up to the federal scrapping of Group Ticket Voting in 2016 (a highlight being when Labor was spouting embarrassing nonsense and I teed off at it on Twitter and some of my comments found their way via Matthias Cormann into Hansard in pretty close to live time).  And we won that one in the parliament and the High Court, not that either were that difficult, and we now have an excellent Senate voting system (except for unweighted Gregory distortion and state based malapportionment, but those are other stories  ...)  This should have been a no-brainer for bipartisan reform; sadly within Labor the wonks got rolled by the hacks and federal Labor opposed it and spouted a lot of nonsense in so doing.  

In the SA battle my involvement was mostly limited to shooting down an unsatisfactory "Voter Choice" proposal to replace GTV; many others dumped on it as well and ultimately SA came up with a much better replacement.   For WA for the 2017 and 2021 elections my involvement was mainly preview articles pointing to the awfulness of the WA system at the time and warning voters off some of the easier ways to elect antivaxxers off tiny shares of the vote.  Once Labor won a majority in both houses in 2021 it was quickly clear GTV was on the way out.  

For Victoria I didn't cover the 2014 upper house election; the scope of this site was smaller then and I was too busy writing 6150 words about Prahran.  As 2018 approached I was dismayed by the preferencing choices of almost every significant party running, in particular how Labor and the Greens had often preferenced right-wingers, crackpots and antivaxxers above each other.  It was clear that parties simply would not learn ... or that the perverse incentives of the system would not let them.  

Following the disgraceful results of that year's upper house election I got involved in the next Electoral Matters cycle, but it went nowhere.  The committee recommended that the parliament initiate an inquiry specific to Group Ticket Voting and the parliament never did it.  A big part of the problem was that Daniel Andrews had total authority and wasn't interested; he seemed to like the system throwing seats that should by voter choice have gone to the Greens instead to randoms who might be easier for him to work with ... especially if he kept the system that they depended on.  

For the 2022 election, alongside all the usual, I put out this, as a resource on the policies and records of parties on the issue, for those voters who cared.  I have mixed feelings about not needing to write a sequel as I'm sure it would have been an even better article!

Through the 2022-6 cycle I always hoped that Labor would support reform but their record was so poor on the issue that they could never be fully trusted even with a bipartisan Electoral Matters recommendation (especially not after what happened federally in 2016), so I didn't stop kicking them until it was all over.  I seem to have made about 190 posts about GTV in Victoria on twitter in this term alone.  As the election drew closer I became more and more concerned that we needed to close off any risk that, with Australian democracy already under attack from anti-preferencers, Victoria was going to subject the nation to another round of a system that had become worse than gamed to death.  The idea that Druery could be rewarded again after openly confessing to using access to his preference networks to control the voting behaviour of MPs on the floor of a Parliament was intolerable.  Everywhere in Australia needed to be better than that.  

As well as the usual cycles of Electoral Matters submissions and occasional articles about the lack of visible progress, I put "Let 2026 be the year Victoria is finally freed of the curse of Group Ticket Voting" on the header of this site late last year and left it there so that visitors to the site would be constantly reminded of the issue.  But all that was only the start.  If either major Victorian party failed to act to abolish Group Ticket Voting in this term I was going to campaign against that party on a significant scale that I think would have got quite a bit of attention, whether it made any difference or not. (If Glenn Druery could send seats willy-nilly from a yacht in Clontarf or whenever then surely I could interfere a little too.)  Especially I was going to encourage voters to take pride in how many parties they normally hated they managed to put that major party below (because few things are worse than having the chance to fix obvious flaws in our democracy and not doing it).  But also rather than just campaigning on that niche issue I was thinking of helping rival parties generally for a month or two pro bono with whatever I could.  Anyone thinking of keeping GTV could not have known how far this might have gone, I do not know and I'm pleased not to have to find out.  

It is important to bear in mind as we reach what is hopefully the permanent end of Group Ticket Voting in Australian elections (I assume it will also soon be removed from Melbourne City Council) that GTV started out as a good idea in the circumstances.  It was brought in federally by the Hawke government for the 1984 election because previous requirements to number every box were leading to informal rates around 10% and deliberate ballot flooding at some elections.  A semi-optional preferencing system would have been better from the start but was not supported by the Coalition and Democrats and so GTV was the best solution for that time.  It should however never have been brought in in Victoria as problems with it elsewhere were by the early 2000s already becoming understood, and it was brought in alongside other unwisely entrenched changes that have made GTV in Victoria a harder tooth to pull than elsewhere.  It's a relief to be finally there and to not have to think about it anymore.  

Anyway I have long intended that when GTV was finally scrapped in Victoria I would unleash a ScoMo joke.  And here it is!

Group Ticket Voting: Going, Going ... ? (Rolling Thread)

GTV repeal has passed Assembly unanimously.

Has passed second reading in Legislative Council and committee stage completed.  On to third reading.

-----------------------

There is more encouraging news on the Group Ticket Voting front today with the Allan Carroll Government finally amid the chaos introducing a Bill to scrap group ticket voting in the Victorian Legislative Council, called the Electoral Amendment (Miscellaneous Matters) Bill 2026.  This rolling thread will follow what happens with this Bill during the week and what is in it.  (A note that I am tracking the registration of deceptively named parties for the Victorian election in this prior post.)

What is known so far is that the Bill will "remove group voting tickets from Legislative Council elections and prescribe a new method for voting above the line, requiring electors to number at least five groups in order of preference. The bill will also make other consequential and miscellaneous amendments to clarify and improve the operation of the Electoral Act and the electoral system in Victoria."

This establishes that the Bill will support a semi-optional Senate-style preferential system (possibly the simple "five above or five below" option), presumably with savings provisions for voters who number fewer above the line boxes.  This is the sensible choice as it encourages preference flows compared to a fully optional preferencing version as in states with lower quotas.

The Bill is scheduled for second reading in the Assembly tomorrow.  Annoyingly in Victoria Bills are not publicly displayed on the website until they get to that stage and therefore I have still not seen the text of this Bill.  A copy would be very handy if anyone has one!  Both Houses sit for only three days this week so I expect the Bill to be passed by Thursday if it is to be passed this week.  The Bill is expected to need Coalition support to pass the Legislative Council.  

I will follow what happens with this Bill with updates through the week.  

Tuesday 9:30 pm: The Bill is listed third under Government Business for second reading with the sitting starting at 9:30 am Wednesday.

Wednesday: The government just moved to change the completion time for the Bill in the Assembly to 7 pm tonight!  This is presumably to allow time for it to go to the Council tomorrow as the previous arrangement would not have allowed time to do this this week. [UPDATE: A source has advised that this is at present the government's intention.]

11:26 The Bill is circulated.  The second reading speech is incorporated into Hansard and the debate (none so far) is adjourned til later today (unclear when yet).  The Bill is available here and I am reading it now.

11:45 The Bill provides for the scrapping of Group Ticket Voting with changes to be in place from this year's election, taking effect from the day after Royal Assent.  As expected it puts in place the "5 above or 5 below" proposal.  The same savings provision as in the Senate will exist to cover votes that have incomplete numbering or breaks in sequence above the line (eg just-1 ATL votes will be counted).  However there is a minor difference with the Commonwealth regime.  Because Victoria has registration of how to vote cards, a registered how to vote card must comply with the formality directions and therefore a just-1 how to vote card (as used by the Liberals on the ACT at one Senate election for instance) will be illegal.  (A 1 vote and a direction to number at least 4 other boxes will be fine).  

2:43 Debate has resumed and James Newbury (Liberal) is speaking.  An advance warning in case anyone says it: the claim that Sack Dan Andrews sent preferences to Labor in 2022 is an urban myth.  Newbury has stated that the Liberals support reform.  He says they were provided with a briefing on Sunday.  He is saying that the Liberals are taking the other amendments on Labor's word.

He has claimed that Labor under Andrews supported GTV because it enabled stacking the Council with minor left MPs.  That's close to the truth but not quite; in fact what GTV did was send seats that should have gone to the Greens to random not-necessarily-left candidates, giving Labor both left and centre/right/random pathways to get bills through.

Newbury has stated that the Opposition will support the speeding of the Bill through the Assembly today and the Council tomorrow.  

2:54 Mathew Hilikari is now correcting Newbury's comments about who GTV advantaged.  For so long I did not think I'd ever hear such an excellent speech from a Labor MP on this issue.  

3:01 Emma Kealy (who has had good form on this issue for some time) also now speaking for the Opposition.  She has said Sack Dan Andrews preferences in Western Metro went to Labor.  In fact they never reached Labor as they remained with Bernie Finn until he lost at the end of the count.  However they could in theory have reached Labor ahead of the Greens and Liberals.

3:09 Dylan Wight now speaking.  

3:17 Tim Read (Greens) now speaking for what he says is the 16th time he has spoken on the issue!  He has correctly noted that GTVs have not yet been abolished from Melbourne City Council, so after tomorrow that could be the last place that they still exist. He talks about how he has done everything possible to fix this including a stunt with a $55,000 actual seat.  Even gets a bit emotional at the end, might not be the only one.  

3:25 Will Fowles (IND ex-ALP) now speaking.   He also supports the Bill so it may well go through unopposed.  

3:32 Debate adjourned but not sure there will be any more of it before the vote.

5:55 Hearing that there has now been a delay and the Bill won't be considered by the upper house til next sitting week in mid-August.  Unconfirmed by government at this stage.  Grrrr.  I assume this is still within the VEC's requirements that the legislation be passed "by August" (they did not say when in August and would presumably start implementation upon knowing the repeal had passed the Assembly with bipartisan support) but would appreciate certainty on this point.

6:10 Read who has been fantastic on this issue is giving his valedictory speech including references to the $55,000 chair.

Thursday 30th: I'm not expecting further action today but will keep half an eye on it in case there is any.

9:36 The Bill has been introduced in the Legislative Council, with the first reading passed and the second reading moved, and debate adjourned "for one week".  So no action today.  Also it is confirmed that the Council will resume on 11 August as scheduled so debate will pick up in that week and I will resume that thread then if there is nothing to add in the meantime. 

Sat 1 Aug: I've seen the Bill is first on the list of Bills for 11 August.

Monday 10 Aug:  There's been some interest in what would actually happen if GTVs were removed without reforming the regions given the change in polling since the last election.  I covered this to a degree in the specific case of One Nation but some broader comments may be useful.

Firstly, it won't be easy for parties other than Labor, Coalition, One Nation and the Greens to win seats but there are possibilities for it to happen somewhere.  In their weaker regions the Greens might in theory get jumped by Legalise Cannabis or perhaps Victorian Socialists.  It's also possible that there could be a region where nobody has much in the race for the last seat (as would have happened with Northern Metropolitan last time) especially if One Nation continues to come off the boil.  But if these parties won more than one or two seats between them that would be surprising.

Secondly one concern about this proposal has been that the Greens have tended to do very well in simulations without GTV and with eight 5-member regions.  But with the rise of One Nation, while the Greens are still protected from terribly unfair results like 2018, it's less likely that they still overperform.  One Nation as an extra player taking seats makes it harder for the Greens to win seats off half a quota.

While it's not ideal that a party might poll 3-5% statewide and not win any upper house seats, it's still way better than keeping Group Ticket Voting.  Voters will be able to freely, easily and effectively control their own preferences and MPs with no mandate will no longer get elected on tiny vote shares.  

Note: I understand that Legalise Cannabis will introduce an amendment to defer the abolition of GTV (because they don't trust the major parties to do anything about the regions afterwards).  They are also introducing an amendment to "make preference-for-profit illegal" (it will be interesting to see how that is worded.)  These amendments will fail if the major parties agree to defeat them.  

Tuesday 11 Aug: the Council sits from midday today, I am not sure how quickly matters might proceed.  As a warmup here's an excellent article by Antony Green about the bizarre come-from-behind results under Group Ticket Voting, most of which would not have occurred in any other electoral system on earth.

12:15 The Council is suspended for an hour following a condolence motion.

1:00 Glenn Druery has been detected whinging and self-aggrandising about the impending repeal.  His comments don't deserve lengthy attention on this thread but I am dealing with them on twitter and blusky.

1:20 Question time on now.

2:50 Still plowing through the other waffle segments.  

3:00 Finally!  We are on, Evan Mulholland (who has long been excellent on this issue) speaking.  His speech includes a list of numerous undemocratic seat outcomes under GTV and points to Labor's poor form in dragging their heels on Group Ticket Voting for so long.  

3:30 Rikki-Lee Tyrrell (One Nation) is up and confirms that One Nation will support scrapping GTV.  Tyrrell spoke for only a few minutes (and spoke very sensibly about the basic reasons for supporting reform).  Party leaders appear to get 30 minutes so the debate may go for some time.

3:32 Sonia Terpstra (ALP) now speaking. Also referring to how group ticket voting elected MPs who were elected on tiny vote shares through buying a seat via preference harvesting (but doesn't explain why Labor did nothing about this system for so long.)  Refers to Tim Quilty and Catherine Cumming getting elected on tiny vote shares but actually Quilty got 3.78% and Cumming got 6.82% (she might have won anyway).  Also incorrectly says Cumming was DLP, she was DHJP.  

There has been some talk about the VEC information that it will supply about parties.  It will be just information about who registered the party, it won't tell voters anything about the party's policy or preferencing recommendations (though those are visible through registered HTV cards).  

3:47 David Davis (Liberal) up now.  Poor old Rod Barton getting quite a pasting over his pandemic bill vote here.  

4:10 I was out for a bit and following debate on my phone; Jeff Bourman (Shooters Fishers and Farmers) was next.  He foreshadowed an amendment to delay the Bill taking effect (as Ettershank has also done outside the House) - in his amendment it would take effect a few days after the election.  He made a couple of spurious claims.  Firstly while the purpose of going from single seats to PR was about making the system more diverse, it was never the intent of Group Ticket Voting that parties be elected on very small vote shares.  Rather, the intent of GTV was a simple high formality voting system for parliaments that would not enact superior optional-preferential or semi-OPV systems.  Victoria should never have brought in GTV given the issues with harvesting that were already becoming apparent, but did.  Secondly Bourman suggested all second-place-on-ticket major party candidates should be nervous because they depend on group tickets for their election.  But that actually applies to party tickets (which remain) not to cross-party preferencing tickets which are being abolished.

Ryan Batchelor (Labor) now speaking in favour.  There's a fair bit of partisan fighting about the Liberals in the past opposing electoral reform.  I will say that the Coalition weren't particularly useful on GTV in the 2018-22 term either, with some individual exceptions.  But for Labor to claim any credit beyond being dragged kicking and screaming after years of inaction on this one is rich.

4:15 Ann-Marie Hermans (Liberal) making the same point as I did in the previous sentence.  

4:20 Georgie Purcell (AJP) will be voting against. Complaining about the bill being rushed through at the end of the term but does anyone really believe the crossbench would have been cooperative on other matters had it been sooner?

4:50 David Ettershank (Legalise Cannabis) talks about this benefiting the old parties (Labor, Liberal, National, Green). Orange elephant in the room says hi. Correctly points out that GTVs are still in use on Melbourne City Council. 

Points to the high rate of ATL voting despite publicity about GTV scandals in 2022, however voting below the line remains an inefficient preferencing method for most voters - and also we STILL do not know how many voters tried to distribute preferences above the line only to have those preferences erased.

Ettershank refers to the Centre for Public Integrity which has released a statement calling for the Bill to be slowed down.  The problem here is that Group Ticket Voting is a proven integrity risk to elections (WA 2013, Druery sting video etc) and allowing the election to proceed with GTV would present new integrity risks through misleading party names like Free Palestine. The core provisions in the Act are a debate that has gone on for many years.

5:15 David Limbrick (Libertarians) up now. Any real libertarian would believe voters should have the right to easily distribute their own preferences at party level.

5:22 Sarah Mansfield first speaker for Greens. Correctly points out among other good points that the argument that political diversity justifies keeping GTV is effectively an argument for sortition.

5:35 Rachel Payne (Legalise Cannabis) up now.  Raises the issue that ON could currently easily win the balance of power and a dozen or so seats, but they are easily winning most of those on raw quotas under GTV anyway, so there's no evidence that keeping GTV would stop them getting the balance of power (or if it did, most likely that balance would just be shared with other minor righties like the SFF or DLP). 

I do sympathise with the idea that a referendum to fix the Council's structure should have been held first. But suppose that referendum passed then GTV wasn't scrapped, that would have been a disaster. So the referendum would have to be in effect on both changes at once, and then if it failed because of some populist backlash then that would have been interpreted as a vote for keeping GTV. I do agree with Legalise Cannabis that there is a big risk that reforming the structure will go in the too hard basket next term.  However I view scrapping GTV now as overwhelmingly important.

5:55 Second reading division on now.

6:00 I didn't get the exact vote (following via subtitles on phone - edit: understand it was 33-5) but it has obviously passed as we are in the committee stage. Comments from the major parties suggest all amendments will be defeated.

6:25 Various questions are being asked, generally by crossbenchers opposed to this change.  Jeff Bourman (SFF) asking why the government did not run an awareness campaign on how voters could vote below the line to route around group ticket voting.  Quite aside from the BTL voting provision being inefficient and the impossibility of educating nearly every voter who would need to hear the message just imagine the message that would be sent by an Electoral Commission awareness campaign that Group Ticket Voting is the electoral system but you need to learn to route around it because it is awful and corrupt, and here's how.  Any sensible person would respond with "just get rid of it then".

6:30 Dinner break for one hour.  

Time to look at the amendments.  The Bourman amendments as well as changing the starting date seek to exempt a member or party from repayment of overpayments of per-vote entitlement if the party "loses a member of Parliament at a general election as a consequence of the removal of group voting tickets" or an independent loses their seat for the same reason.  This is an extremely silly amendment because to establish that an MP lost their seat because GTV was removed one would have to establish that they would have won with GTV and to establish that one would have to know GTV preference flow allocations that would not have been made because GTV no longer exists.  And whether voters would have voted the same way if GTV had been kept which is also unknowable.  

The Legalise Cannabis amendments also defer the scrapping of GTV til just after the election.  They insert a new clause to supposedly ban preference harvesting for profit under which it would be an offence to, for profit "provide advice or purport to advise, whether in writing or orally, a person or registered political party on how to allocate preferences for candidates or groups in an election."  This would not work; Glenn Druery has already said he would continue to preference-harvest for free and what would probably happen if this amendment were passed is that preference harvesters would keep working on a notionally voluntary basis but find that winning minor parties were suddenly very keen to employ them as staffers.  I am also reminded of a common problem with feral cat control that if you shoot the big feral cat in an area you get lots more little ones - it would lead to an abundance of amateur preference harvesters and party hacks doing DIY preference harvesting, often incompetently.  

The Limbrick amendment seeks to require a review report on the impact of the changes after the election, a condition that already applies to the public funding changes in the Electoral Further Amendment Act 2026.  It also requires that review process to consider the findings of the Electoral Matters review into the structure of the Council.   This amendment would introduce electoral structure and result debates into a review process that is about a funding, disclosure and expenditure system.  There is no reason to do this and it risks the panel that makes the report being too thinly stretched in relevant expertise and making mistakes.  There is no reason why the impact of abandoning GTV and the structure debate cannot be dealt with through Electoral Matters.  

7:50 David Limbrick is asking a lot of technical questions (some of them rather good) and Ingrid Stitt is answering for the government, in many cases on advice.

There has been mention of ticks and crosses.  The regime is the same as the Senate - a tick or cross above the line is treated as a 1 and a vote above the line containing effectively a single 1 (even if it is a tick or cross) is formal.  

8:00 Rachel Payne asking questions now.

Asks what evidence there is that voters understand the new system.  Well the fact that they've used effectively the same system in four Senate elections already might be some of that.  

Also asks about informal votes.  Yes a 1 above the line is formal under savings provisions.  

8:20 Limbrick asked some more questions, now on to Purcell.  Some very repetitive questions between different speakers.

8:30 Limbrick talking about exhaust.  I disagree strongly that votes not exhausting is a good thing about the current system, since the reason votes do not exhaust is that they are being sent places the voter has no idea about and would be vanishingly unlikely to have chosen.  Exhaust rates were the subject of massive overhyping in the Senate reform process; exhaust has been far lower than opponents claimed and many of the vote values that do exhaust are partial values where votes have already helped elect someone.  

8:45 I want to address the question just asked by Payne about the 2003 committee's comments on unintended consequences and piecemeal reform.  The issue is that preference harvesting is itself an unintended consequence of what the 2003 committee negligently (given the already known issues with preference harvesting at the same time) supported.

8:48 We are through Clause 1 and on to Jeff Bourman's amendments.  

8:56 Bourman's first two amendments were taken together and defeated with five votes in favour. 

9:00 Ettershank amendment to ban preference harvesting for profit is up now and even Limbrick is against it.  Mulholland (with a nice line about incarcerating non violent offenders) and Mansfield correctly note that the best solution to preference whispering is to get rid of group ticket voting.  Only three votes in favour.

9:05 On to Bourman's third amendment (the one re refunding money) - as correctly noted by Stitt and Mansfield the amendment is unworkable for the VEC, as I've noted above.  It should be also noted that members elected under GTV have sometimes ended up losing their seats even with greatly increased votes, as happened to the Shooters in Northern Victoria in 2018.  This one also found only five supporters.

9:21 On to the third reading vote with all amendments defeated.

9:27 FINALLY!  Legislation to repeal Group Ticket Voting has passed the Victorian Parliament.  

I am now awaiting Royal Assent to confirm it is gone.

Not-A-Poll Reset 2 of 2026: Allan Resigns

It's another success for voters in the Next Leader To Go Not-A-Poll as the outright majority favourite was indeed the next leader to depart, improving the record of Not-A-Poll to 8/15 including six of the last seven.

When I opened voting on 13 February there was a spirited initial battle between Jacinta Allan and Angus Taylor with the lead swapping a few times over several hours.  In following days Allan built a large lead with for some reason a lot of votes for her on 18 and 20 February.  Over time this grew into a majority.  Allan was a promising bet because her dire leadership ratings and her party's wobbly voting intention polling suggested there were two different ways she could go, and nobody else seemed especially likely to go before the Victorian election.

Allan formally resigned but was facing an active challenge that appeared very likely to succeed.  Had Allan resisted (assuming she had sufficient signatures) there would have been a member ballot in which she would have needed an overwhelming margin to defeat Ben Carroll.  

Allan is the first ever female Australian Premier to be in effect rolled by her party.  Five previous female Premiers lost elections, one resigned under corruption investigation and one resigned while not under active pressure.  At Territory level two female Chief Ministers lost elections (one after also being temporarily out of the job through a mid-term change of office), one lost a no-confidence vote, two resigned without threat of challenge (one to move to federal politics) and one resigned in disgrace.  One is still there and Lia Finocchiaro is the only federal leader of an Australian government.  For the first time since February 2015 there are no female Premiers.

Filling the very big shoes of Daniel Andrews, Allan took over at a time when there was remarkably little leadership satisfaction polling.  The only reading in her first year in office was a net -6 from Redbridge after only a few months in the role.  By the time personal ratings for Allan were seen again she had been in office for almost a year and a half, and every net rating for her from then on was net -28 or worse, culminating in a final net -46 from Newspoll (the worst for any state Premier in Newspoll's history).  

I think Allan to some degree bore the brunt of dissatisfactions with her ageing government that went beyone her own leadership, but she was also seen as lacking cut-through and unwilling to act on Victoria's longrunning union corruption crisis.

In preferred leader polling (which favours incumbents) Allan initially had satisfactory leads over John Pesutto but these soon shrunk to inadequate and Pesutto even managed a pyrrhic 1-point win in his final poll as leader.  Allan trailed Brad Battin in every poll during his leadership by an average 8.8% and Jess Wilson by an average of 16.1%.

There is very strong history that unpopular state Premiers either lose or are removed.  The writing has been on the wall re Victorian Labor's likely fate if Allan took them to an election for well over a year, obscured only by the possibility that the Coalition's national malaise would save them.  And yet it has taken til four months from the election for Labor to do something.  If they had a messiah they would surely have done so before.

Ben Carroll takes over seeking to buck a different pattern.  Governments under their third Premier or Chief Minister of a term tend to lose, frequently heavily.  The last exception was the CLP in the NT in 1987, and that was in the days when the NT was practically a one-party territory.  Four months generally isn't long enough for a new Premier to establish themselves, so it won't be easy for him.  Some particularly awkward lines from interviews from the last round of leadership speculation in June are also already appearing as the easiest of attack ads ever made.  

Will anyone else go before the election?  Angus Taylor has yet to lead the Coalition to any serious recovery in their polling and there remains talk that Andrew Hastie might be lurking awaiting a go, but maybe not that soon.  Jeremy Rockliff's minority government has had more lives than a cat but has recently lost two ministers to integrity and misleading-the-house matters and the Premier himself has been censured; how long will his heart be in it and what will the parliament do next time? If you meet people involved in ACT politics the subject of Andrew Barr moving on at some time is never far away, but perhaps the recent resignation of his Deputy would make him more inclined to continue to ensure the party can re-stabilise.  Anthony Albanese has ordinary ratings but doesn't seem likely to go anywhere soon, and nor do any of the others.   There was however some recent federal speculation about Peter Malinauskas, which he was quick to hose down.  Over to you, voters; I suspect I'll be back for another episode sooner rather than later!

Tasmania Redistribution: The Franklin Renaming Fiasco

In 1984 there was a proposal to rename the electorate that is now called Lyons (and was then called Wilmot) "Truganini".  For a little while this was being reported and discussed in papers, there was widespread opposition and the change was withdrawn.  Wilmot became Lyons instead.  I was twelve years old at the time and I remember this in broad outline.  But I wonder if the Augmented Electoral Commission's corporate memory goes back this far.  

Unfortunately we yet again have had a redistribution proposal for a Tasmanian electorate to have an Aboriginal name where that proposal has been supported out of pretty much nowhere and sparked significant opposition.  Last week's boundary announcement has seen 272 written submissions, most of them opposing the proposed replacement of the name Franklin with Tongerlongeter.

I want to contrast this with the process that led to the replacement of the name Denison with Clark.  By the time this change was made in the 2017 redistribution, there was a very well organised movement to change Denison to Clark.  This proposal had been active in the previous cycle and by the 2017 cycle its adherents included several prominent Tasmanians, judges, current and former politicians and there was even a petition supporting it.  It is true that the new name was not endorsed until the Augmented Electoral Commission stage but by that stage the proposal was so well known that anyone with anything to say had said it, and the change of name attracted only three further objections, I don't think any of them from Tasmanians.  People might have agreed or disagreed with the change but people knew why the change was being proposed, why Clark if there was a new name, and why there were objections to Denison.

Victoria 2026: The Election Where All Sorts Of Things Can Happen!

Victoria Aggregate Labor 26.0 Coalition 27.3 Green 12.8 One Nation 23.7 others 10.3
(polls are probably underestimating "others" vote)
2PP estimate 52.0 to Coalition vs ALP, shadow-2PP ALP 50.1 vs One Nation

Currently Coalition would be likely to govern in minority with One Nation support, with One Nation seat tally around the mid-teens

One Nation and Labor seat numbers are highly dependent on Coalition preferencing decisions

Both major parties are still capable of majority government with a modest swing from current primaries

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It's been forever - largely because of the amount of work I had on in the first half of the year - since the last time I looked at Victorian state polling in the leadup to this year's election in any depth but finally a good time to do so has arrived.  What I see, at the moment, is a picture with a lot of possibilities.  Arguments can be made on current polling that the Allan Labor Government, while currently behind, is not far from surviving.  Arguments can also be made that it is not far from losing the election so badly that it may not even be the second party.  For now this is a really difficult election to model - much harder than South Australia - but perhaps by polling day things will get a lot clearer.  This one is a rather mathsy modelling article that has been rated 3/5 on the Wonk Factor scale.  

Is Group Ticket Voting Really On The Way Out In Victoria?

The last week has brought the encouraging news via both The Age and The Herald-Sun that Victorian Labor is preparing legislation to scrap Group Ticket Voting at the last possible chance before this year's election. According to the reports, the legislation will be brought in in the sitting week starting July 28, and would presumably pass both houses quickly in order to meet the VEC's August deadline.  

Let's hope this is finally it for all this nonsense!  I understand the smaller parties may be reluctant to vote for a new system under which their chances of winning any seats are greatly reduced for now thanks to the Bracks Government's entrenchment blunders, so I'll cut them slack so long as they refrain from making false claims in defence of their position.  But if any major party stands in the way or does nothing this time then there is no excuse for them not caring about democracy.  

Tasmania Redistribution: Announcement Day Live Thread

Today could be a momentous day in the history of Tasmanian electoral boundaries!  Or it could be a nothing-ever-happens.  Around mid-morning today there will be a boundary announcement.  If the announcement is either the same as the draft boundaries or only slightly different then that's it and the new boundaries will be official for federal elections after 8 October.  It usually takes several months for them to then be adopted at state level via legislation, so an early state election before, say, mid-2027 would not necessarily be on the new boundaries.  

Alternatively the Augmented Electoral Commission could recommend substantively different boundaries, which would result in further rounds of consultation.  I have seen no variations from process that would suggest there is any intent to do this so far, but I am not sure if that should be taken as a sign that it's not happening.  

My previous articles are here:

Clark Must Expand But Where?

Draft Scraps The Franklin Divide

The Reaction

Once the announcement is up I will be posting details of what has been decided.  I'm not Ben Raue or William Bowe so please do not expect new margin calculations from this source.  However I will have summaries and comments about the decision, whatever it is.  

DemosAU: Could Hare-Clark Help One Nation Shift Tasmania To The Right?

DemosAU Liberal 28 Labor 21 One Nation 21 Greens 14 IND 12 SF+F 2 Others 2

Seat estimate if these vote shares were recorded in election "held now" Lib 10 ALP 9 ON 8 Grn 4 IND 4

After a previous state poll which did not explicitly include One Nation, DemosAU have now included them in their Tasmanian state polling for the first time.  The party, which has been advertised for state registration, debuts on 21%, similar to the 19% it recorded in the May EMRS.  But if we add the Liberal and One Nation votes in the EMRS poll, we get 44%.  In the DemosAU poll, it is 49.

This raises a thought experiment.  Yes, we know One Nation is trashing the Liberal vote everywhere and that they would win seats from the Liberals in Tasmania right now.  But what if, by taking votes from Labor and increasing the overall right vote, they ended up taking a fourth seat for the right in Bass (where the right nearly won four last time anyway), a third seat for the right in Franklin (ditto) and - though this I think would be the hardest part - a third seat for the right in Clark?  (That's on the current boundaries; if the proposed new boundaries are accepted I expect similar scenarios to emerge).  

It's a very long way to the next election, or is it?  After the historic censuring of Premier Rockliff, as prospective Senator Stansfield notes in the latest Poll Position pod, at some point there will be another scandal.  And at that point Labor will have painted themselves into an even tighter corner than before. If they don't want to force another election that nobody wants and that now also floods the House with One Nation, they can either form a government nobody understands, or look comically impotent as they pass meaningless censure motions or do nothing.  

Tas Liberal Senate Turnover As Duniam And Askew To Go

I had a piece in drafts almost ready to release for weeks about this, but perhaps just as well I didn't since further developments have rendered the draft somewhat out of date.   The last few weeks have seen major news in the leadup to the expected 2028 half-Senate election with the Tasmanian Liberal ticket to lose both its incumbents.  Incumbent since 2019 Wendy Askew was to retire at the end of the term but will now resign in coming weeks while incumbent since 2016 Jonno Duniam will quit by the end of this year.  Askew's successor will get something like 20 months and Duniam's successor about 17 in the Senate in the lead-up to the next election, assuming it is on schedule and not early. 

The preselection currently underway is for the next election but I would expect that the top two candidates will inherit the seats of Askew and Duniam unless there are twists regarding availability.  

While it may seem disastrous for the Liberals to be go in with no incumbents, in some ways it is an advantage to them compared to if just one incumbent departed now.  The party now has more flexibility in planning a 2028 ticket from scratch without, for instance, feeling pressured to choose a female candidate as the sole winner of the vacancy race as might have been the case had only Askew departed.