We are getting ever closer to the Victorian state election, to be held in just over six months in late November.
The Victorian Labor government has yet to make a decision on whether it will follow the lead of every other Australian jurisdiction and abolish the group voting ticket system which allows parties to control the preferences of their voters for the Legislative Council, or upper house. They will have to make a call soon, to give the VEC time to implement a new system.
One of the issues that has apparently given some Labor figures pause has been the rise in support for One Nation, and concern that reforming the system would help out the far-right party. There was one report in the Guardian at the end of April, and I have also heard it from other sources.
For this blog post I want to grapple with this question – how might One Nation’s rise be affected by a new electoral system, and how does this affect the urgency of this reform?
When One Nation first emerged in 1998, they were mostly on their own when it came to minor parties of the right. They did not gain preferences from the Coalition, and there wasn’t really anyone else to help them out with preferences. One Nation pulled a full quota in Queensland and won one seat, but they also polled close to 10% in New South Wales, Western Australia and South Australia but missed out. I suspect a system of voter-controlled preferences may have helped them then.
But when One Nation re-emerged in 2016, the landscape had changed. There was now a lot more right-wing minor parties, and they were much more willing to include One Nation in preference arrangements. The Coalition has also become much more comfortable dealing with One Nation, in particular at the 2025 federal election. One Nation no longer stands alone. The pool of minor party votes had grown substantially, on both the left and right, to the point where there is enough votes there to sometimes elect two minor parties in a state at the one Senate election.
And of course, things have changed dramatically since 2025. Recent Victorian state polling gives One Nation average support of 22%. That is well and truly enough to get one MLC elected in a region, and in some of their stronger regions they would be challenging for a second seat. It’s very different to the One Nation of 2022, who polled 2% for the Legislative Council, trailing four other small parties.
The One Nation of today would not benefit from group voting tickets, for the same reason the Greens, Labor and the Coalition don’t benefit. Small parties see benefits in swapping preferences with each other: parties like Labor, the Greens and the Liberal Party are likely to be in competition for that final seat, so don’t have as much to offer. One Nation will now be in that camp: not because there is anything special about them, but because that’s what happens with big parties.
Glenn Druery has always been known to big-note his impact on electoral politics, and recently he’s been running with the line that group voting tickets, and in particular his infuence over minor parties, constrains One Nation. Yet in 2022, preferences from seven of the nine Druery-aligned parties flowed to One Nation’s Rikki-Lee Tyrell in Northern Victoria, helping her win.
And of course, the small parties who benefit from GVTs are not necessarily immune to far-right politics. Preference arrangements of the kind that has made Glenn Druery famous may well help elect other small parties of the far right instead. There is no guarantee they would be any more progressive than One Nation.
So what would likely happen without group voting tickets? It’s very difficult to predict exactly what would happen, with or without reform, because voting trends have shifted so significantly since 2022.
But something we do know is that One Nation will do much better, regardless of upper house reform. If One Nation is polling in the low twenties, it is likely they will be polling close to two quotas in non-metropolitan regions and a quota in most urban regions. Based on current polling, you would expect the Coalition to lose quite a few seats, and Labor would likely go down too, if less dramatically.
Reforming group voting tickets would only have an impact on seats where no party wins a full quota.
Under the Senate electoral system, the candidate who has the lead on the primary vote would have a good chance of winning, with preferences playing a reduced role. In contrast, under group voting tickets a candidate with a very low primary vote has the prospect of catching up. Parties of the left have been known to do slightly better on preferences than those of the right, but the main shift would be making it harder for a leading candidate to lose their lead.
Under a reformed system, I would expect all of the bigger parties to do better without GVTs than with them: Labor, Coalition, One Nation and the Greens.
I understand that there may be concerns about One Nation doing better under a reformed system, but reform isn’t to blame. Voters have changed how they vote, and that will change the results.
It’s a fool’s game to try to design an electoral system because of its impact on one party’s short-term prospects. Because parties change their position, and the impact changes over time.
Until recently, the single-member system used to elect the lower house has kept a party like One Nation out, but it’s not likely to do that anymore. Indeed it’s possible One Nation could end up winning more seats than their share of the vote in the lower house, if their vote climbs any higher. I think it’s better to have a fair voting system, and work it out from there.
Indeed one could argue that systems that damage trust in our democracy are worse. The group voting ticket system encourages behaviour that effectively tries to trick voters into misusing their vote. Indeed, far-right activist Avi Yemeni has recently registered three parties with misleading names like the ‘Free Palestine Party’ and ‘Muslim Votes Matter’, and has said that these parties will direct preferences to One Nation. A system that makes this a legal and indeed logical tactic is doing more damage than any reform could do.
The need to sort out campaign funding has probably bumped the reform of GVT down the legislative queue. The Labor Government has had years to sort this out but has done sweet f**k all. It is in the interest of the micro parties to vote against it as they would never get elected otherwise and love having their snouts at the trough. It has famously hurt the Coalition and the Greens for years, and One Nation can probably be added to that list. The members elected in 2018 from <1% votes should have motivated action but no. The Andrews and Allan have always been cynical about democratic processes – why should the leopard change its spots now?