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 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.

JSCEM's Strange Case For Extra Territory Senators

Yesterday saw the release of the final version of the Joint Standing Committee into Electoral Matters report into the 2022 election.  Following the somewhat lightweight and culture-war afflicted 2019 report it was good to see a return to substance, but that is not to say that everything is wonderful.  There are various welcome aspects of JSCEM's findings and proposals that I may comment on later but for now I wanted to deal with JSCEM's recommendation to increase the number of Senators for the ACT and Northern Territory from two to four apiece.  (I'm also considering a longer article about the current push for "truth in electoral advertising" laws, and the extent to which that movement is being fanned by naive support arising from the Voice failure and the rise of Donald Trump style candidates.)

Increasing the number of Territory Senators can be done by legislation and could in theory very well happen before the next election, while an increase in the House of Representatives is likely to be a second-term project for the Albanese Government, assuming that it gets a second term.   As the support of Labor, the Greens and David Pocock for expansion appears highly likely, the Government would only, for instance, need the support of either Lidia Thorpe or the Lambie Network (or even someone to abstain or be away) to pass the change.  In theory an expansion could be challenged in the High Court but the prospects for any challenge would seem dim.  The Constitution allows the Parliament to create Territory representation on whatever terms it likes and so long as there's some reasonable argument rather than it just being an out-and-out stack, it's hard to see on what basis the Court could say no. 

Victorian Party Policies On Fixing Group Ticket Voting

The Scoreboard - Victorian Election 2022

The following parties have a publicly documented commitment to, or position of support for, scrapping Group Ticket Voting:

* Victorian Socialists (longstanding)

* Australian Greens (longstanding)

* Animal Justice Party (added 16/11 - conditional on single statewide electorate)

* Pauline Hanson's One Nation (added 17/11)

* Legalise Cannabis (added 22/11)

See comments below for what these parties have said about the issue.  

Other parties will be listed here when I become aware that they qualify.  Parties that have publicly documented commitments to policies that would clearly significantly reduce the Group Ticket Voting problem may also be noted in this section.  

Don't take too much notice of how short this list is in the early stages of the campaign - but if a party has not been listed in this Scoreboard section by voting time and electoral reform is important to you, please don't vote 1 for it. 

Some voters may wish to specifically avoid parties that are part of Glenn Druery's preferencing network.  All such parties are marked with a (D) after their name for the benefit of voters who may want to put them last.

Party Registration Crackdown Tracker

SCOREBOARD

+7 New parties registered under new rules

-13 Existing parties deregistered following new rules (excludes deregistrations under old rules)

Final net change following new rules: -6

Parties registered for 2022 election: 38

One party is listed as an applicant for registration that cannot occur before the election as the party register is now frozen.

Three parties are formally listed for potential deregistration that cannot occur before the election for the same reason. 

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(This article is continually updated - the original intro text is below)

The Electoral Legislation Amendment (Party Registration Integrity) Bill 2021 has passed the Senate without amendments and will shortly receive Royal Assent.  The Bill (i) increases the party membership number requirement for non-parliamentary parties to 1500 members (ii) requires that a person can only be counted as a member of one party (iii) prevents parties from registering names that use words already used by pre-existing parties without consent, with some exceptions.

My view on these changes was expressed in a previous article (The Trolls That Got There First).  I think the membership changes are in principle good and will not disadvantage minor parties with any real chance of ever winning seats - on the contrary they should reduce ballot paper clutter and encourage micro-parties to merge into units more likely to be competitive with bigger parties.  However I believe this should have been accompanied by reform to the current unfair and confusing treatment of non-party groups, which could become more common and cause increased confusion and unsightly ballot papers following this change. Also, the change disadvantages parties with their support based in the NT, ACT or Tasmania and there should probably be a one-jurisdiction registration option with the old 500 member limit.  

The Trolls That Got There First: Proposed New Party Registration Laws

 A raft of electoral reform legislation hit parliament this week.  Included in the collection of Bills introduced by Assistant Minister for Electoral Affairs Ben Morton are:

* The Electoral Legislation Amendment (Counting, Scrutiny and Operational Efficiencies) Bill 2021 which, if passed, allows the AEC to commence sorting prepoll votes at 4 pm, sets the prepoll period before polling day at 12 days, increases the number of scrutineers allowed for Senate elections and makes various changes to postal vote procedures.

* The Electoral Legislation Amendment (Political Campaigners) Bill 2021 which, if passed, alters requirements for disclosure by political campaigners, bringing them more into line with those for parties.

* The Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Offences and Preventing Multiple Voting) Bill 2021 which, if passed, firstly allows for a voter to be required to cast a declaration vote in future if they are a suspected multiple voter.  Secondly it clarifies that offences against electoral liberty may include "Violence, obscene or discriminatory abuse, property damage and harassment or stalking" in connection with an election and increases the penalties for breaches, including up to three years' jail.

Tasmanian Electoral Reform and A Current Electoral Amendment Bill

There has been much discussion of the progress, or lack thereof, of electoral reform in Tasmania in recent weeks.  Most of this discussion has focused on donation law reform issues including disclosure requirements, possible donation caps and potentially public spending. These matters were addressed in the Electoral Act Reform Report, which was reportedly completed in December 2019 but remains unreleased.  Premier Gutwein has stated that the progress on electoral reform is not a priority for the government at the moment because it is occupied with coronavirus-related challenges.  

There is still (barring an early election, regarding which speculation has declined) plenty of time for reforms to House of Assembly donations processes to be passed prior to an expected March 2022 election, should the parliament choose to do so.  (My broad view is that donation reform before that election - to increase both the range and timeliness of required disclosures - would be extremely desirable as the current requirements are far too lax, but that spending caps require very careful consideration to avoid the errors of a previous attempt.)

Why I Don't Prefer Abolishing Above The Line Voting

This week I sent a submission (not yet posted) to the Victorian Electoral Matters committee, concerning the 2018 Victorian election.  Primarily, my submission called for the abolition of Group Ticket Voting in the Victorian Legislative Council and its replacement with a Senate-style system or similar.  This follows a farcical, gamed-to-death 2018 election in which ten micro-party MLCs were elected from primary vote shares eight of them would not have won from under any other system, including two from less than 1% of the vote.

In the event that Victoria won't abolish Group Ticket Voting completely, I suggested the state at least clip its wings a little by:

* allowing an above-the-line preferencing option, so that votes that were just-1 above the line would still be distributed by Group Ticket, but voters could choose to distribute their own party preferences as in the Senate.

* banning preference trading and a range of related consultant activities

* bulk-excluding all parties that fail to clear a primary vote threshold of 4% at the start of the count

Ways To Improve Tasmanian Council Elections

On Tuesday I voted in the Hobart City Council elections.  (By the way, if you haven't voted yet, you might want to take your vote direct to your local council centre.) After following this election for months, including researching the candidates and writing a guide to the election it still took me 70 minutes to fill out my ballot papers, albeit with a little live tweeting of my thought processes on the way.  I'm not even convinced I did all that good a job of it, and suspect it would have taken me 3-4 hours to come up with a vote that was the best I could possibly do.  If it wasn't for the fact that there are always people who need putting near the bottom, I would have been wondering why I even bothered.

What Happened When The Previous Government Moved To Change Tasmania's Donation Laws

I have used the word "moved" instead of "tried" in the title of this piece. There is a reason for that.

Tasmania's lax political donation and disclosure laws have become a major controversy in the Tasmanian election campaign (see guide), with the Greens threatening to move a no-confidence motion against the Hodgman government unless it discloses the campaign donations funding what seems to be a very expensive campaign.  References have been made to failed attempts to reform campaign donations in the last days of the previous Labor-Green government, with Labor saying simply that the Liberals blocked them.  So I thought I'd refresh my memory, and then that of anyone reading, concerning what actually happened there.