(Coverage of Victorian by-elections tonight from 6 pm. Live page will go up around 5 pm).
Initially this system lacked obvious downsides but its potential for exploitation was obvious as early as the 1987 federal election, where a Nuclear Disarmament candidate with 1.5% of the primary vote was elected. A series of farcical GTV elections around the country since led to the abolition of the system in NSW, federally, SA and WA leaving only Victoria. Problems exposed with the system have included:
* parties winning off tiny vote shares defeating much more popular parties when they would not win under any other system
* confusing and deceptive GTV preference allocations that are beyond the understanding of most voters if they tried to follow them
* preference harvesting in which ideologically unrelated parties band together to try to secure election off each others' group ticket preferences
* creation of unnecessary tipping points that should be irrelevant to the contest, making it easier for elections to be voided (eg WA Senate 2013)
* creation of bogus near-100% preference flows between parties when, if asked to choose preferences for themselves, voters spread preferences in a much less concentrated fashion
* corruption of parliamentary voting behaviour, in the form of party votes on electoral reform being influenced by fear of losing the ability to work with Glenn Druery, as stated by Druery himself in the Angry Victorians sting video
* denying voters the ability to direct their own preferences between parties above the line (which they will be used to doing so having done so twice since the last state election) and throwing away their stated preferences and overwrites them with a group ticket vote if they do.
*confusion between the Victorian system and the Senate system
In over a decade in office the Victorian Labor government has continually dragged its heels on fixing group ticket voting. And this week it has done it again!
In its excellent and impressively thorough report on the 2022 election the Electoral Matters committee recommended not only that group ticket voting be scrapped but that:
"Eliminating group voting tickets should occur independently of changes to the regions and must not be delayed in order to take place after or at the same time as changes to the regions.
The proposed changes involve serious and complex issues, with changes potentially having significant consequences for the make-up of Victoria’s Parliament. They may make it more difficult for smaller parties to be represented in the Upper House. Changes to the number of members and/or regions would compensate for this by lowering the quota for election.
While the Committee believes that the best outcome for Victoria would be the elimination of group voting tickets together with a change to the regions, the Committee considers that eliminating group voting tickets would be beneficial even without changes to the regions."
(p. 61)
The issue here is that the Bracks Government foolishly used manner and form entrenchment to entrench a Legislative Council system of 8 regions with 5 members each into the Victorian Constitution, so a referendum is now needed to remove it. This was despite the limits of 5-member seats for fair representation of minor parties already being on show in the 1998 Tasmanian election. In the current environment, abolishing Group Ticket Voting without changing the regional structure is likely to over-represent the Greens while providing few seats for other minor parties, although there are many minor parties in Victoria with a few percent support that deserve a seat in a 40-member Council.
The recommendation above in italics was almost unanimous, supported by all Labor members of the committee and strongly by now Liberal leader Brad Battin in additional comments. The only opposition was from Legalise Cannabis MLC David Ettershank who while supporting abolishing GTV also wanted the abolition linked to reform of the regions to avoid a situation where non-Green minor parties probably won very few seats.
Ettershank is not in the Council to muck around and has flagged on his core issue that he will start blocking unrelated legislation in the absence of cannabis reform. Perhaps Labor was reluctant to endorse the bit in italics for fear of invoking a similar response, but if so they could have at least announced in-principle support for scrapping GTV in 2030 subject to (or better, following but irrespective of) a 2026 referendum on whatever structure best resolved the minor-party issue. Personally, while I would greatly prefer GTV to be scrapped for 2026 I would accept it if a deal was passed to make sure 2026 was the last GTV election.
By deferring any response until after the Legislative Council structure review has concluded in December, the government may well have guaranteed that there will be no reform this term and that a referendum on a new structure is the best case for this term. The government presumably won't be passing legislation in December and legislation passed in February would leave the Victorian Electoral Commission with a risky eight-month lead-in to implement a new system. But the Government's failure to even announce any kind of in-principle support for scrapping Group Ticket voting suggests they are scared not of Ettershank but Druery. This is their response:
"Further consideration required
The EMC is undertaking its Inquiry into Victoria’s Upper House electoral
system and is due to report by 8 December 2025. The government will
await the findings of this Inquiry before forming a view on this
recommendation."
This government has had ten years in office to form at least an in-principle view, based on abundant evidence, that Group Ticket Voting needs to go in the bin. How long can it take? In the absence of even in-principle or conditional support - with nothing but more stalling - there is no basis for faith that Labor will do anything about the issue at all. Even if they do allow a referendum on the structure, they could sabotage the referendum and then use its failure as a reason to say no to scrapping Group Tickets - if, that is, they're still in office.
This copout isn't an isolated case. Another issue raised in the Electoral Matters report was the need to replace the Inclusive Gregory method for surplus transfers with Weighted Inclusive Gregory. Inclusive Gregory is a flaw left over from the paper-counting days in which votes included in a surplus all continue on at the same new value as each other irrespective of the value they had going in. In the computer age, continuing to distort the values of votes by using Inclusive Gregory is simply not justifiable whether one has Group Ticket Voting or not and however many regions with however many members one has. It's just a no-brainer to eliminate an unfair feature from the count. So what is the response?
"Further consideration required The EMC is undertaking its Inquiry into Victoria’s Upper House electoral system and is due to report by 8 December 2025. The government will await the findings of this Inquiry before forming a view on this recommendation."
Sigh. The call for submissions by Electoral Matters explicitly states "We're not seeking views on [..] how votes should be counted" - the inquiry is all about the structure of a presumably post-GTV system.
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As for the current inquiry, submissions have not yet been posted, but a quick summary of mine. The discussion paper canvassed six alternative possible structures for the Legislative Council:
* 40 member single electorate all in all out
* 20 member electorate half in half out
* 4 x 10 member regions
* 7 x 7 member regions
* 8 x 5 member regions with topup seats for underrepresented parties
* 25 member urban region with 3x5 rural/regional regions
I most liked the 4-region system followed by the 40 member single electorate (the latter has some disadvantages including election off very low vote shares and potential ballot structure impact on that). However, I found that 4x11 appeared superior to 4x10 in terms of both minor party representation and a workable Council for governments. I disliked 2x20 (including because eight years is just too long, and also because of the risks of obstruction), 7x7 (because it is little different to 8x5), the topup proposal (because primary vote threshholds are arbitrary and may be manipulated), and 25+3x5 (rural/regional voters would have a substantially inferior representation experience.)
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