VICTORIA Labor and the Greens have just given themselves a better chance of winning the state’s Upper House in the coming November election, in which One Nation has emerged as a major player.
Labor and the Greens combined last week to abolish the group voting ticket (GVT) system for the state’s Upper House (Legislative Council) elections and install the regular, Australia-wide system that has worked in favour of the Greens (effectively the Left of the Labor Party) in state and federal elections across the country.
But the GVT system itself was also worked by Labor, the Greens to take control of the Upper House with the support of small leftist parties such as the Animal Justice Party and the Legalise Cannabis Party.
However, with the Electoral Amendment (Miscellaneous Matters) Bill 2026 now law, those parties and the Libertarian MP David Limbrick and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers MP Jeff Bourman, will be struggling to get in on preference deals.
Bourman and Limbrick should be working with One Nation, given that they have established themselves in the Upper House.
Victoria’s Legislative Council was the only remaining upper house in Australia to use the GVT system, in which voters could only choose one party above the line on the ballot paper, with their preferences then allocated by the party if it was knocked out on first preference votes during counting.
This system meant that in the last decade some 20 candidates were elected with under 6% of the vote – some as low as 1% – who defeated candidates with many more votes because of clever preference deals.
Australian Associated Press, reflecting mainstream opinion, says the GVT system “has long been criticised by experts, including election analyst Antony Green, as they allow backroom deals between parties to flourish and enable some candidates to get elected with a small number of primary votes.”
Indeed, and the Labor Party used it to ensure Greens and small leftist parties exploited the system to the hilt in order to rule with almost unfettered power in Victoria. This will not change under the new system, because the vote-above-the-line system was originally designed to benefit the Greens.
Antony Green says the new system, the one used by state Upper Houses across Australia including for the Senate, will allow voters to control their own preferences, but only if they number all the squares in order of preference.
Cairns News electoral expert Lex Stewart says there is no ideal voting system, but abolishing GVTs will not be the “massive win for democracy” claimed by many including Monica Smit of Reignite Democracy. “It will make life easier for the Greens,” says Mr Stewart.
“The system that former PM Malcolm Turnbull rammed through the federal parliament in early 2016 to abolish group voting tickets introduced a system for Senate voting that was designed by the Greens, and for years it was advocated by the Greens but by nobody else except leftie Turnbull,” he said.
“Hansard shows that the ALP was vehemently against the new senate system (1 to 6 above the line), because they could see that it would give, and does give, an unfair advantage to the Greens – it is built into the mathematics, of the preference flows, but very few people understand the maths.”
Mr Stewart says the unfair advantage to the Greens happened, for example, in the 2016 election, when the Greens got only 8.7% of the votes, but got 12% of the Senators elected and in the 2019 election, they got 10% of the votes but 15% of the Senators elected.
“And therefore now we are saddled with the enrichment of the number of Greens far beyond their entitlement, and therefore they in effect control the Senate.
“The antidote to this poisonous Senate voting system is to please number every square, putting the Greens last, rather than merely numbering six boxes above the line.”
