Wednesday, 29 July 2026

 James NEWBURY (Brighton) (14:43): I rise to speak on the Electoral Amendment (Miscellaneous Matters) Bill 2026. I do note the importance of the bill and the importance of fixing a problem in our electoral system with speed, and that is why I will make a few comments, not use the full time for comments. I know one of my colleagues intends to do the same, and I believe that a number of members on the other side will make a few brief comments as well and the bill will be dealt with later this day. That is important.

There is no doubt that the group voting system that has been in place in Victoria has been in place because, I suspect, the former former Premier Daniel Andrews supported the system because it gamed the system for the left, simply put. I do acknowledge that action is now being taken post his premiership to address that. It is something that the Liberals and Nationals support. We support the stopping of gaming the system. Simply put, we support the change that is being proposed in this bill because the system was being gamed, where a very small number of candidates were working together with a very small number of votes to game the system. We have seen terrible examples over time, both state and federally, where a number of candidates have worked together and with assistance from people – electoral experts, as they would say, who understand the system – to game the system. It was wrong.

Federally, action was taken. There has been a very longstanding push at a state level for action here too, and that action was delayed. As I said earlier, I think that there is probably some common recognition that that was because of the views of former former Premier Daniel Andrews. I think that he preferred an upper house where there were certain left-wing elected members – and when I say ‘elected’, I mean through a very, very small number of votes. He preferred working with an upper house that was, I suggest, perhaps in some cases the extreme left, because it suited his purpose to try and find and cobble together votes to pass his legislation and his legislative reforms through the upper house.

We support reform, and that is why I intend to make some comments and assist with the passage of this bill. I may say, though, we were first notified formally of this bill on, from memory, Friday. It may have been Thursday; if it was Thursday, excuse me, but I believe it was Friday. As soon as we were formally advised of the bill we were provided a briefing with the former Premier’s office, on Sunday, and I do acknowledge and appreciate the briefing on this bill on a Sunday. We were very keen to have it, and I do acknowledge that the former Premier’s office was clearly doing a lot of things at the time. In that briefing we made it clear that when it comes to group voting reforms, we support group voting reform. There are other matters in the bill which I will briefly speak to, but we actually said, if it would assist, if the government proposed simply group voting reform, we could immediately support it without any delay at all.

There are a number of other matters which do not appear to be controversial, and we obviously, given the timeframe, have had to take the government at its word that a number of these amendments have been pushed, for want of a better word, by the Victorian Electoral Commission. We are taking the government at face value in relation to the other amendments. If I can break them into two parts, firstly there are a series of vote-saving measures which do align with the Commonwealth regime of vote saving. We support a vote-saving mechanism. For everybody – and I am sure many people in this chamber have stood and scrutineered – vote saving is important. We want to make sure that everybody’s democratic vote is counted. There are circumstances where people make mistakes or misunderstand how to vote, and it is a real shame when you see those votes. Many times you understand what you believe the voter intended to say. The practice now is that those votes are set to the side and the district manager will review each of those votes manually and approve each of those votes manually. For example, if a box is not fully filled in or perhaps they have filled in a list of numbers but put a tick in one of those boxes, where it is clear what their preference is, there is a question about the validity of that vote. We want to save that vote. We want to make sure that their vote is counted. Most of the time now, through a system of practice per se more than anything else – it certainly is not through legislation – district managers are given effectively a practice note on votes to save where those measures are in place. What this legislation does in relation to vote saving is put that practice into law, and that is a good thing. As I said, it mirrors the Commonwealth legislation. It ensures that if there is a list of numbers and there is a break but a break that is obvious – or a tick or a cross where the intention is obvious – that vote is counted. We support that.

There are also a small number of amendments in relation to the part 12 electoral changes that were put through this place in March. They were very contentious. My understanding in relation to this bill is the changes in this bill are not contentious per se, in that a number of the March reforms enabled changes through regulation, and there has been a question from the Victorian Electoral Commission as to whether or not they should have been made through legislation, so this is formalising those changes – things like the reporting of overpayments by nominated entities. It does not effectively create a new power; what it does is it formalises it by way of legislation rather than regulation, which was proposed in the March legislation. It does not go into the more contentious parts of that bill. Noting that we are talking about part 12, it would be remiss of me not to say we have a very longstanding concern in relation to the way that the government has managed donation laws and of course have said that we do not support the way that the government amended the law in March, effectively putting caps on everything except unions. There is simply an uncapped donation river from the unions, which is enabled through those part 12 legislative reforms. It is shocking, I know, but that currently is the case. The coalition have said that we do not support it, and we certainly will not let it stand if we are honoured to be elected at the November election later this year. Those are the three things that this bill does: group voting, vote saving and clarifying legislative heads of power in relation to some of the part 12 changes that occurred in March.

I will finish where I began by saying that we support the measures in relation to group voting. We believe that this has been long needed, and I do acknowledge that we are not the only party not in government to have pushed that. We have believed for a very long time that votes should not be gamed. Victoria was out of step with the rest of the country. As I said before, I believe it was because of the former former Premier and his views on group voting and I guess his practical want in relation to numbers in the upper house. I guess there is no other way to say it. We have been out of step with the rest of the country. We have seen terrible examples, including at a federal level – I do not in any way say that it was just at a state level that we have seen abuse and gaming of the system – and at the federal level they took action. I am glad that we are seeing action through this bill, which is why not only are we supporting its speedy passage but we will be ensuring and facilitating as best we can the bill going through the chamber today and going through, as I anticipate, for debate in the Council tomorrow.

 Mathew HILAKARI (Point Cook) (14:53): I rise to support this bill, and I am glad that the opposition has spoken in support of this bill as well. For a process that began by attempting to increase formality in the federal Senate, it has turned into, in my view, a deeply undemocratic process. I might agree with where the member for Brighton ended up, but I disagree with some of his commentary and how he got there. I had not thought that this was a process which has particularly improved any left votes in the upper house, and no less a luminary than Antony Green agrees with me on that – to a degree, at least. I hope I am not misquoting Antony Green. I am sure I will get an email in response if I do. But certainly, to quote from some of his work in this area – and that has been extensive and longstanding work in this area – he noted that in 2014 in the Western Metropolitan Region the Democratic Labour Party polled at 2.57 per cent and knocked out the third Labor candidate, who started on 10.65 per cent, which I reckon is a net one down for the Labor Party. In the Western Vic Region in the same year James Purcell of Vote 1 Local Jobs polled 1.28 per cent, and the Greens, who began the count on 9.19 per cent, ended up getting knocked out. In Eastern Metro Region in 2018 the Greens polled 15 times as much as Rod Barton from the Transport Matters Party, with 9 per cent, and yet they were not elected. In the South-East Metropolitan Region in 2018 the second Liberal – I will give a shout-out to the Liberals here – started on 12.3 per cent. 16.66 per cent is the quota for the upper house, and they were knocked over by Liberal Democrats David Limbrick on 0.84 per cent of the vote. I will go to the last election, most importantly, probably. In Northern Vic two members were elected at well below the quota of 16.66 per cent: One Nation on 3.68 per cent and the Animal Justice Party on 1.53 per cent. Those parties gained the same number of seats in the upper house as the Victorian Labor Party, who polled many times over that. So I would not say that this has been a particularly strong preference to left or right, at the end of the day.

It is process of voting which has been discredited, in my view – a process that does not lead to democratic outcomes and the outcomes that people would expect when they fill in their votes. As I said, it started in the Senate as a process of trying to save votes, to make sure we lifted formality by requiring just one vote above the line, but preference whispering has changed that over time. Parliaments have been getting rid of that process since 2000: New South Wales first, the Commonwealth in 2016, South Australia in 2017 and Western Australia in 2021. The Electoral Matters Committee since 2022 has provided two reports that have asked for this one to be removed. Victorians deserve to control where their preferences go – of course they should – and who gets elected. Under the current system parties can direct preferences and how they flow through group voting tickets, and it means upper house members win from deals, not necessarily with support on the ground.

This Electoral Amendment (Miscellaneous Matters) Bill 2026 was introduced into the Parliament yesterday, and we are moving through quickly because it is important. We have an election not far away. It will end preference whispering. It will require voters to put five numbers above the line in order of their preference – not political party preferences, not preference whisperer preferences. This change will bring us into line with those states that I have mentioned already, and nationally.

This bill will also require that the Victorian Electoral Commission publish information about new political parties, so people are informed about who they are. We should know this information, which should be publicly available. It will also build on the Labor government’s political donation laws, which are stopping big money and overseas money. We had a little gap in our system earlier this year, but it will fortunately assist with that as well.

I finally want to talk about the important role that this bill will play in making sure that formality of voting is continued. The savings provisions in this bill include marking a ‘1’, a tick or a cross only above the line to save the vote and make sure that those preferences flow through a ticket if a ticket does exist below the line.

Fair elections, we know, are the absolute bedrock. The most important thing this Parliament can do for itself is to make sure there are free, fair and transparent elections and that Victorians are confident that their preferences flow through to the candidates that they would like to see elected. I am going to finish up and wrap up my speaking now to make sure this hastily gets through the house.

 Emma KEALY (Lowan) (14:58): I rise today to speak on the Electoral Amendment (Miscellaneous Matters) Bill 2026. This matter will eliminate group voting tickets. For me this is an enormously important piece of legislation to pass through this house. I do thank all who have been part of former committees and the Electoral Matters Committee in putting this recommendation forward and for there being a level of agreement amongst this Parliament’s politicians that there needs to be significant reform in the way that group voting tickets are presented to voters. Most importantly, I think there are a vast number of people who agree that we cannot have a voting system where there may be deliberate misleading or vote whispering which would mislead voters about their vote going away from the sort of government or politician or parliamentarian that they were intending to elect.

This is a challenge that was investigated by the Electoral Matters Committee, and I refer to the inquiry report, which was published in July 2024, The Conduct of the 2022 Victorian State Election: Volume ‍1 ‍– Key Reforms. Chapter 6 is dedicated to this issue, which is addressed within the legislation before us today, in relation to reforming the upper house voting system. The report is very good reading, and for anybody who has concerns about the removal of group voting tickets, I do recommend that they read this report. What has been identified, which the previous speaker referred to, is that there have been circumstances where the names of parties have been deliberately misleading in order to attract preferences and votes in a way that is not immediately transparent on the voting ticket. For those who recall the size of the upper house ballot paper at the 2022 election, it could not be unfurled within the ballot box. I think it was around a metre wide, if not larger. It certainly had so many different micro-parties that had been established, and people had no idea not just who they were voting for but where their preferences would end up because there simply was not sufficient time to make that investigation when you were in the booth seeking to cast your vote.

There are a number of matters that I would like to particularly highlight which I think can only be described as deceptive conduct in relation to the names of some of these parties and where the votes would end up. If you had voted 1 for the ‘sack Dan Andrews’ party in Western Victoria last election, your preferences went to Labor. Now, I do not think that anybody put who put a 1 in the ‘sack Dan Andrews’ party would ever expect that that preference would assist another Labor MP to be elected to Parliament. I am not utilising this simply as a political reason or rationale, and I am not suggesting that the Labor Party were behind that, but it certainly was an effect that the Labor Party benefited from, having a micro-party established very, very quickly before the election named the ‘sack Dan Andrews’ party. We do not want a democratic system whereby there can be such straightforward, blatant deception of voters trying to attract a vote which completely pushes it in the opposite direction from their intent.

As was described by a previous member, we also have had circumstances where candidates who received an exceptionally low number of primary votes have been elected to this Parliament, and they have been elected through the process of preference whispering, where deals are done behind closed doors without any scrutiny or public transparency over how those deals are made. There was certainly very concerning conduct that was identified as part of the inquiry report that I mentioned earlier through the Electoral Matters Committee which clearly demonstrated that conversations were being had with micro-parties. There were cash deals being made. There were deals indicated within those hearings that identified that there was an exchange of work by Glenn Druery to employ that person within the office of the party using electoral funds. That is nothing short of corrupt conduct. It is a recommendation within the minority report, which is put forward within the report that I mentioned earlier, that this matter is also dealt with, and I would like to quote in relation to this minority report some aspects that were identified:

One of the most concerning matters uncovered by the Inquiry is the use of Group Voting Tickets to deliver election outcomes that do not reflect the will of Victorian people. GVTs facilitate the election of candidates who lack genuine voter support, allowing political operatives like ‘preference whisperer’ Glenn Druery to game the system. This manipulation is not just a theoretical concern; it has real-world implications that erode public trust in our democratic institutions.

I stand by that comment. This reform is well overdue, and I know in previous parliaments the Electoral Matters Committee has made similar recommendations. Unfortunately, it is not legislation that has made it to this house. That is one of the reasons that I nominated to contribute my time to the Electoral Matters Committee, because I could see that this conduct was increasingly impacting on the electoral results in this state, and I believe it is nothing short of dishonest, and deliberately dishonest, conduct. I am very much supportive of the legislation before us today because I believe it will help to restore trust in our electoral system.

There is another aspect which was identified by the Electoral Matters Committee in relation to what system we go to next. It was my strong view that we should make sure that our electoral system is as simple as possible. We already have a system through the Senate federally whereby we have a level of understanding and knowledge of how our voting system operates. It has always been my view that the Victorian upper house system should replicate that of the Senate. If we can provide consistency between the Commonwealth and the Victorian systems, it will lead to Victorians being informed and able to cast a vote that reflects their intent. No matter who they are voting for, that is what we should always seek in a democratic system: we should respect the intent of the voter.

I understand that there is a matter that has not been addressed in this legislation, and there have been discussions around it, in relation to whether a tick or a cross should be deemed as a vote for or whether a cross should be deemed as a vote against. I do not believe that we should let lingering debate on this point delay the legislation that is before this house. Therefore I believe that we should continue those discussions. But it is my view that the reforms that are within the legislation before us today are the key reforms that we need to bring in before the next election to ensure that the system cannot be gamed.

We have had in the past representation by the Animal Justice Party in the seat of Western Victoria. The Animal Justice Party attracted just 1.7 per cent of the vote in Western Victoria. They leapfrogged above many other candidates who got a much, much higher amount of first preference votes. They achieved their election to the upper house simply because of preferences that were gamed and harvested through a system which should be made illegal.

Through this legislation we will ensure that when the people of western Victoria are voting, they are not inadvertently voting for someone who is seeking to shut down the agricultural industry and intensive stock industry in a region where that is our bread and butter and our economic powerhouse. We need to ensure at all times that Victorians are able to cast a vote to get the government that they want and the government they deserve. So I strongly support the legislation that is before us today, and I commend all of those who have helped make that happen through previous Electoral Matters Committee inquiries and through the current committee. I also congratulate all members and the supportive team who have made this happen. It is something that we can all leave this place and be very proud of – that we have an electoral system that actually improves democracy in our state, improves transparency, is consistent with the Senate electoral process and voting format and should result in an electoral result that reflects the intent of the voter.

 Dylan WIGHT (Tarneit) (15:08): It gives me a great deal of pleasure to rise this afternoon and make a contribution in favour of the amendments to the Electoral Act 2002 which we are debating this afternoon, chief amongst them the abolition of group voting tickets, as well as some other consequential amendments, which I will touch on briefly. I will keep my remarks relatively brief as I understand the urgency of this bill and the desire for the government, all things going well, to send this piece of legislation to the Legislative Council and to have it passed this week.

Some will say that this piece of legislation has been a long time coming. It is principally informed by two different reports from the Electoral Matters Committee – one being the 2022 electoral review, and also an inquiry into Victoria’s upper house voting system which was undertaken last year, and I chaired that – both of which reports unequivocally recommend abolishing group voting tickets and the group voting ticket system in Victoria’s upper house.

I was only present on the Electoral Matters Committee for one of those, which was the review into Victoria’s upper house voting system. The evidence that we heard overwhelmingly recommended getting rid of this system in Victoria, the last jurisdiction that has been using it anywhere in Australia. As we sat there and listened to evidence, it became clear that if we were going to continue to use this system to elect upper house members here in Victoria then it would seriously call into question the integrity of our democracy and the integrity of our upper house elections. We heard countless amounts of evidence, and you do not need to hear evidence; you can just go to the election results of minor parties. Please do not get me wrong. The vast majority of upper house members from minor parties in the Legislative Council are fantastic people with good values. There are some that are a bit weird. There are some different ones.

Emma Kealy interjected.

Dylan WIGHT: I will not name names, because you and I may have a different position on that, member for Lowan. But to have members of that place elected on a fraction of a quota – let us keep in mind that a quota for a seat in the upper house of Parliament is 16.7 per cent of the vote. To have some members receiving less than 1 per cent or less than 2 per cent or less than 3 per cent and then able to take advantage of this preference-whispering or preference-harvesting system to gradually find themselves above a candidate that may be on 12 or 13 per cent of the primary vote I think is unsustainable and genuinely calls the integrity of our upper house system into question.

That report into Victoria’s upper house voting system – the member for Lowan did touch on it – also talks about what is next. We are unable to legislate that at this point, but I have no doubt that that will be a topic and a point of contention in the next Parliament. I am not having a go here, member for Lowan, but, from what I understand, you just advocated for the same system as the Senate, which would be the same as the New South Wales upper house system, which is contrary to your party’s submission to that inquiry. But I do agree.

Emma Kealy interjected.

Dylan WIGHT: Sorry, you were not talking about the structure of the upper house? All good. But the report, which has informed a fair bit of this legislation, does talk about a two-staged approach: get rid of group voting tickets and get rid of them now – we cannot wait, we do not have time to lose; all of the evidence said that – and then let us come back in the next term and have a conversation about what the structure of the upper house looks like, because as we know, that requires a referendum, and as we know, there is no time for a referendum between now and the state election.

I said that I would keep my remarks brief. The only other short remarks that I want to make are that in 2002 the Bracks government created this legislation and created this voting system, and they did so at the time with the best of intentions – no-one can question that. And for a period of time this system worked, there is no doubt about that. I had a quick look back at the 2006 results in the upper house from Western Victoria, and I think there were less than 10 parties on the ballot. There was a minute amount of parties on the ballot – parties, not candidates. It was not that long. If we go in now to vote in an upper house election, there is a ballot paper that stretches from here to the Acting Speaker. What that has unfortunately allowed is the gaming of these preferences for financial gain from some bloke in Western Australia, which we just could not allow to continue.

The other quick thing that I wanted to touch on, as the member for Point Cook did, is the saving provisions in this piece of legislation. The member for Point Cook and I know, as members that represent areas with significant multicultural representation, formality in our elections is incredibly important. A fundamental pillar of our democracy is making it as easy as possible for people to cast a formal vote. The saving provisions in this bill, to be able to enhance formality in our upper house elections anywhere that we can, are also incredibly important.

I will wrap up my remarks now. This is a piece of legislation that is urgent, and that is why we are trying to get it through the lower house and the upper house as quickly as we can. But it is also a piece of legislation that is fundamental to the integrity of our upper house elections and to our democracy. I commend the bill to the house.

 Tim READ (Brunswick) (15:16): I rise to give enthusiastic support to this long-needed reform to our democracy. By my quick count this is the 16th time in two terms in Parliament that I have spoken about the need to abolish group voting tickets. In fact I spoke about it in my first speech back in February 2019, and I might indulge the vanity of quoting myself, where I said:

… upper house seats were bought for as little as $50 000 by manipulation of group voting tickets. I am not sure what is more embarrassing – the manipulation of the preferences or the low price.

To think that for less than the price of a HiLux you could get yourself a four-year job on the red chairs. I thought that was just about as bad as the entirely legal but corrupt preference-trading cartel that was created to do this. In fact the 2018 election was a real embarrassment because at least 20 per cent of the seats were filled by virtue of this cash-for-preferences game. In my speech I concluded that:

We must make it easier for voters to direct their preferences in the direction they actually prefer.

I am very glad that on 29 July, awfully close to the Victorian Electoral Commission’s (VEC) August deadline, this embarrassment will soon be over. It should not have taken so many years of campaigning by democracy advocates and the Greens to get us here, but let us not examine the dentition of this particular gift horse. We are very happy that it is happening, and we commend the government for bringing this legislation.

The reality is that most Victorian voters still do not know what group voting tickets are or why they are bad for our democracy. In fact the only place they will be left will be the City of Melbourne, which I understand still uses group voting tickets. So that is a project. Let me just briefly explain. When you vote in the Legislative Council, you can vote above or below the line. Below the line you number your preferred candidates directly. Above the line in Victoria you write ‘1’ next to your preferred party and leave the rest blank, and your preferences are then allocated according to the group voting ticket, which your party registers in advance with the VEC – basically a list of where the party directs your preferences. So Victorians, until this coming election, have not been allowed to allocate their own preferences when they vote above the line, as more than 90 per cent of voters do. That meant that most people had their preferences determined by a process they did not understand. In 2018 there was the extraordinary example of people voting for the Animal Justice Party having their preferences in at least one region wind up with the gun-loving then Liberal Democrats, now the Libertarians.

As the member for Tarneit said, and I agree, they were introduced for the right reason – to reduce informal voting – but they became increasingly controversial and were abolished from the Commonwealth, from New South Wales and more recently from WA as candidates with tiny primary votes started winning seats through preference deals. Everywhere in Australia has abolished them, and Victoria is now the only state that still has them. They produce unrepresentative results and distort voter intention, and they let parties with very few votes swap preferences among themselves to accumulate a quota. As Antony Green has observed, they can be manipulated to elect parties with just a tiny percentage of the vote. Another 2018 example is the Transport Matters Party’s Rod Barton, which despite the name of the party was essentially a taxi advocate party, who won on a primary vote of just 0.62 per cent, ahead of, as it happens, a Greens candidate who had the third-highest primary vote, of over 8 per cent.

Group voting tickets, when they were used, were published on the VEC website and displayed at polling places, but almost no-one looked at them and even fewer could make sense of the tangled preference deals behind them. In practice they are invisible and nearly impossible to evaluate before voting. Group voting tickets were also a honey pot for grifters. Ahead of the last two Victorian elections the so-called preference whisperer Glenn Druery – a chap who, as I understand it, lives on a yacht somewhere in New South Wales – organised micro-parties into preference-swapping cartels for a fee: $5000 up-front to join the network and up to $55,000 in success fees. Druery has openly said he does not care what his candidates do once elected as long as they do not touch his golden goose, the group voting tickets. Druery is an interesting character – a sort of clever, amoral person who seems to see democracy as a playground and a way to make money. The problem with this is it can be dangerous. It can leave large percentages of voters unrepresented. He has also got a talent for seeking attention, having once enrolled his cat in a swimming race for dogs in Pittwater.

The Victorian Electoral Matters Committee’s 2025 final report, as the member for Tarneit explained, puts it very plainly. These tickets:

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

The only argument for keeping them is that they bring voices into Parliament that you would not otherwise see elected, even if those voices are wildly unrepresentative of what voters actually want, but you might as well use sortition or a lottery instead. Concerns about group voting tickets being a mechanism to keep One Nation out of Parliament have been debunked in recent blog posts by Kevin Bonham and Ben Raue, both of which were written in the last few months, and I recommend people read them. They point out the obscenely undemocratic nature of Victoria’s upper house elections.

It has taken the government way too long to fix this, but hey, isn’t it wonderful? Over my time as an MP I have worn floaties and a sailor hat, I have wheeled a big red chair with a $55,000 price tag in front of the media, I have called out fake parties trying to siphon votes to the far right, I have assisted in drafting a private members bill and I have campaigned in the media to the public and quietly behind closed doors to the government. The Greens have pulled every lever we can think of to try and get the government to fix a system that allows voter preferences and seats in Victoria’s Parliament to be bought, and today that work is paying off. At the end of my time in Parliament I am reminded that when we stand together to fight against unjust systems, we can make change.

 Will FOWLES (Ringwood) (15:24): It is my honour, frankly, to follow the contribution of the member for Brunswick. I know we will be hearing from him a little bit later today, but he has been a tireless advocate around this issue and a tireless advocate on a great many issues in this place. He has made a magnificent contribution to public life in Victoria. He is a man of great decency and great integrity. His contribution in this chamber will be sorely missed, and I, at a personal level, will very much miss his decency and his friendship. I thank him very much for everything he has done over the course of his contribution to public life in Victoria. He is genuinely a remarkable human being. Were the chamber comprised of more Tim Reads, I suspect there would be a lot less blueing in this joint and a lot more cooperation. So thank you, Tim.

I rise to make a couple of points around this. This is a reform that is long overdue, and I support it. And to be very clear, I think this is perhaps going to be a rare moment of absolute unanimity, at least in this chamber today. It is pretty rare to get political actors and professional politicians to agree on changes to an electoral system with such unanimity, because most changes tend to favour one group over another or whatever. But I do want to make the point that this will cruel the chances of some more minority voices in Victoria gaining a seat at the table, and we can talk about the relative merits of that.

The rough premise is that for as long as the upper house, the upper chamber, is divided into eight regions, basically the price of entry, if you like, or the threshold to get elected is going to be about 15 ‍per cent of the primary vote in order to attract a seat in the upper house. The primary vote, I am talking about – I can see the member for Preston going, ‘No, no, it’s 16.67 per cent.’ But yes, that is after the distribution of preferences. So we can argue the toss but, broadly speaking – call it 13, 14, 15 ‍per cent – it is probably the primary you are going to need to –

Mathew Hilakari interjected.

Will FOWLES: Sorry, six recurring. It is quite right that the member for Point Cook pulls me up. I am not going to quote it to 10 decimal places, although I might be tempted. So yes, the price of admission, if you like, to the other chamber changes as a result of this change.

This is a very good change because it gets rid of the Glenn Druery factor, the preference whispering. It is a good change because it is more accountable. It is a good change because it is more transparent. To be very clear, I support the changes, but I think we need to be abundantly clear that the better model for the other chamber, in my view, is that if you are going to have a proportionally represented house it ought to have the largest franchise that you can muster. And in my view, that ought to be a proportional representation house with a single electorate with 40 members. That would change the relevant threshold from circa 15 per cent to more like 2.5 per cent. The change in the composition, frankly, would not be that dramatic. Still it would be, after this election – I was going to say a four-party system. Still it would deliver the five-party result we will see after this election, namely Greens, Labor, Liberal, National and One Nation – God help us. But by having a multimember electorate and a single electorate, you would enfranchise some of those important voices that might only attract a primary vote of, say, 5 per cent or 6 per cent and even down to, sure, 3 or 2.5 per cent. But let us be very clear: that is still tens and tens of thousands of Victorians. If you can attract a primary vote of even 3 per cent, that is a large number of people in absolute terms. And it does not really threaten the hegemony of those five parties I have just outlined; it simply adds a bit of colour at the margins. And I think that colour has been helpful.

We can all debate the merits of whether the motoring enthusiasts in the federal Senate did much for the great democratic debate in Australia. We can debate whether the Transport Matters Party – although I quite like Rod – delivered a great deal. But I think if the threshold is lowered from 15 to 2.5 ‍per cent, you do get more diversity. You will still have the democratic will of the people reflected. If it is a single member electorate, you will still have those five parties I have listed, all represented and likely in good numbers, subject to how much of the Nats vote gets cannibalised by One Nation. They will all be represented. But I think an unfortunate consequence, and not a necessary consequence, of this change is that you are removing the voices from future debates about the structure of that chamber. You are removing the very voices who would benefit from a change like that.

If you are only keeping the big five, if you like, in that chamber, which is an outcome of this bill, then it will be very, very hard for there to be much political momentum around having a single-member electorate in the other place. That would be my preference. That, frankly, has always been my preference. I have not been converted on the road to – what is that phrase?

A member interjected.

Will FOWLES: Damascus. Thank you. I was about to say Mecca, but that is not it. I have not been converted on the road to Damascus. I have always held the view that it ought to be as democratic as possible, and I think, notwithstanding that this is a good and democratic reform, it does have that somewhat anti-democratic outcome if you do not also reform the structure of the chamber. I appreciate time is agin us. That is a shame. I appreciate that this is still a good reform in isolation, but I would like the record to reflect that, notwithstanding the unanimity in this chamber, there is not necessarily unanimity about the ideal structure of the other place. I would like to make clear in my contribution that I think, and I am sure others do agree, either in this place or the other place, that the preferable model is not being delivered up here. It is just a better model than what we have at the moment. Nonetheless, I commend this bill to the house.

 Gabrielle WILLIAMS (Dandenong – Minister for Transport Infrastructure, Minister for Public and Active Transport, Minister for Women and Girls) (15:31): I move:

That the debate be now adjourned.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned.

Ordered that debate be adjourned until later this day.