Hansard debates

Tim READ (Brunswick) (11:09): I too will be speaking about the Electoral Matters Committee report into the 2022 state election and specifically its recommendation that the government get rid of our group voting ticket system, which is used in electing our upper house. Victoria is the only place in Australia where if you vote above the line, as 90 per cent of people do, you cannot direct your own preferences. Instead the party you vote for does this using a system known as group voting tickets, meaning parties can make backroom deals and decide who gets your second and third preferences and so on.

You may not have even heard of some of these parties, and you might not like their policies. In 2018 people voting for the Animal Justice Party in some parts of Victoria had their preferences elect gun-loving libertarians. This system allows parties to deal with each other to swap preferences, and they do. Because few voters buck the trend and vote below the line, a band of small parties can trade preferences until one gets elected off a tiny primary vote. So people form all kinds of single-issue parties, some with very few members, just to join in this scheme. This adds to the long list of parties and candidates making the ballot paper the size of a small tablecloth.

One notorious backroom dealer, Glenn Druery, has made a career of signing micro-parties up for preference deals in return for cash. About $55,000 will get you a seat in Victoria’s upper house with this scheme. The 2018 election for the Victorian upper house was labelled a farce by many experts. Eight of the 40 MPs were elected over other candidates who had much larger votes, often 10 times or more larger. The Transport Matters MP, a taxi advocate, was elected with just 2500 votes, or 0.6 per cent of the vote, while the 35,000 people who voted for the Greens candidate, 14 times as many votes, were left unrepresented. The Transport Matters MP was more accountable to the preference whisperer Druery than to the voters in his region, very few of whom had ever heard of him or knew what he stood for. Most of the people whose preferences elected him were voting for another party in Druery’s team, and they had never heard of Transport Matters.

Other states and the Commonwealth have scrapped group voting. The last to get rid of it was Western Australia, after it had the astonishing result in 2021 of electing a candidate from the little-known Daylight Savings Party with just 98 votes, or 0.2 per cent, from a region ironically with the highest level of opposition to daylight savings in the state. Druery’s manipulation of the group voting system meant that it just did not matter that only one in 500 voters voted for the guy. It does not matter what you stand for; if you pay your money, you can get elected. Popular support is not an issue. So WA got rid of it.

But after the Victorian farce in 2018, the Victorian Labor government pretended to care but kicked the can down the road. Maybe they preferred a non-representative upper house. In their 2019 inquiry into that election the then Electoral Matters Committee chair, a Labor government MP, told witnesses at public hearings not to talk about upper house voting, because that evidence would be taken at a later date. But that later date never came, despite regular reminders from the Greens. To their credit this Electoral Matters Committee in this term of Parliament has finally recommended an end to this corrupt system. They further recommend adopting the same system used to elect the federal Senate and to ‘allow voters to indicate multiple preferences for parties above the line’. Every other state and the Commonwealth have done it. There is now no excuse for Victorian Labor not to do it. Get rid of this corrupt system.