Tuesday, 12 May 2026

 Chris CREWTHER (Mornington) (10:53): I rise to speak on the Electoral Matters Committee’s inquiry into Victoria’s upper house electoral system final report. Few issues go more directly to the health of our democracy than the way Victorians elect their representatives. This was a serious piece of committee work, informed by expert evidence, public submissions and a clear recognition that Victoria’s current system is no longer serving voters as it should.

Whatever our political differences in this place, we should all be able to agree that voters should know where their vote is going and their preferences should reflect their choice, not a backroom deal stitched together by party operatives or preference negotiators. Indeed this report makes one thing crystal clear: Victoria’s upper house voting system is the last of its kind in the nation, and it is the last for a reason. Group voting tickets have had their day. They let parties, operatives and preference whisperers decide where a voter’s ballot goes after the voter has stopped writing. This is not a feature of a healthy democracy. Our committee’s December 2025 report says plainly:

Group voting tickets have led to votes being counted in ways that people do not know or understand and have undermined trust in the electoral system.

That is why they must go, and we have seen exactly how this works in practice. The committee’s earlier review of the 2018 election found that Rodney Barton of Transport Matters won from just 2508 first-preference votes in Eastern Metro Region, while the Greens candidate there had 34,957 votes but did not get up. It recorded that Transport Matters won a seat from just 0.62 per cent of the statewide vote, while Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party won three seats from 3.75 per cent.

Barton was elected after group voting ticket preference flows, including over 38,000 above-the-line votes from eight microparties and nearly 11,000 Labor surplus votes. If that reflects the free and informed expression of voter will, then words have lost their meaning. Experts like Antony Green told the committee that the kind of distortion Victoria produced is impossible in systems where voters control their own preferences. He said group voting tickets allow parties to game the system – that is the phrase, ‘game the system’. And that is exactly why the committee’s recommendation is so important. It says that we should take the first immediate step now, abolish group voting tickets, let voters direct preferences above the line and restore the basic democratic idea that your vote should go where you send it, not where a party machine or preference-whisperer sends it behind your back. Across the years all sorts of parties have worked this system or benefited from it. We have had Transport Matters, Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, Animal Justice Party and in 2022 even the ballot paper curiosity of Sack Dan Andrews Restore Democracy, which directed votes to Labor. That all said, Labor and the left have been the primary beneficiaries in recent years of this preference-gaming.

While I am talking about the extensive gaming of the upper house system, we also see this gaming in the lower house with compulsory preferential voting. In Dunkley in 2019, for example, despite the AEC’s boundary change, I was still able to win the primary vote but lost primarily due to preferences that Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party directed to Labor. They were effectively running on a platform of ‘tough on crime’, splitting the Liberal Party’s vote and directing votes to the Labor Party, whose policies were less tough on these issues. Or look at Werribee recently: the Liberals won the primary vote, but Labor won due to preferences from the Greens, Victorian Socialists, Legalise Cannabis and some others. I saw people walking in in Werribee not wanting to vote for Labor but then picking up the how-to-vote cards for these minor parties, usually not knowing that by following these how-to-vote cards, their vote was going to Labor. Now we see Avi Yemini from Rebel News, who has set up the Free Palestine and Muslim Votes Matter parties with the aim to direct preferences to One Nation and more conservative parties. Some might mock this, but by doing so, he is making a point about the failures of this group voting system, a system which has been cynically used for years, particularly on the left, such as with the Sack Daniel Andrews party. He is making the point of how crazy the current system is and how easily it can be manipulated and that either such parties must be accepted if they meet the rules or, ideally, the system should be abolished.

Our laws indeed permit anyone to market one thing to voters and deliver another thing through the preference machinery, so the problem is the machinery. But we seem to see this Labor government now hesitating on making this reform. This time last year Labor might have suspected that group voting tickets might help the Greens get more seats in the upper house, replacing this plethora of small minor parties winning seats on the back of preference deals, which in turn helps Labor, given Greens normally aligning with Labor. But now it seems this government are afraid that such a change would help Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party get more votes instead, and so we have seen them go cold. But democracy is not a party management exercise. It should be about democracy. It should be about this government getting rid of group voting tickets.