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 for the challenger 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 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. (As of late 2016 I still wasn't intending to get that involved in upper house systems in states beyond my own, but over time that changed ...) 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 wherever 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 that 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!
