A piece of legislation passed Victoria’s upper house last night that seems set to abolish the last use of group voting tickets for public office in Australia. Legislation making changes to local government electoral law in Victoria was amended, apparently with the support of the government, to abolish group voting tickets for the City of Melbourne. This is the only council in Victoria to use this electoral system, and as far as I know it is the only local council in Australia to use this method of election.
The legislation will also go some way to diluting the significance of the non-residential vote in the City of Melbourne. Currently non-residential businesses and property owners each get two votes in City of Melbourne elections (just for that one council), which allows them to outvote the residential population. That clause has not been removed, but it appears that automatic enrolment of non-residential voters will end, which should go some way to reducing the number of non-residential voters.
I am currently working on a historical research project on group voting tickets, likely to put out after next year’s New South Wales state election. The GVT appears to have been an invention of the Australian Electoral Office (soon to become the AEC) in 1983 as a solution to the problem of high informal voting levels for the Australian Senate. The newly-elected Hawke Labor government had a policy of introducing optional preferential voting to solve the informality problem. Indeed the Whitlam government had legislation introducing OPV that died in the Senate in 1975. But with the Coalition and the Democrats strongly opposed to OPV, the GVT (or ‘the list system’ as it was called at the time) was a solution.
It quickly spread to New South Wales and South Australia, and was introduced in Western Australia when proportional representation was introduced in 1987. New South Wales was the first to abolish GVTs following the 1999 election, and then Victoria introduced the practice when proportional representation was introduced in 2006.
The next City of Melbourne election will be held in late 2028.
I cannot rule out the possibility that some other elected bodies uses GVTs – when I was active in the University of Sydney SRC around 2005-6, numerous other student associations used GVTs to simplify enormous ballot papers. The Sydney Uni SRC at the time elected 45-47 members to their SRC on a single ballot paper. The number was reduced to be in the thirties, but I also made sure that the SRC adopted a NSW-style above-the-line system rather than GVTs.
Anyway, congratulations to Victorians for finally making this move, and also making a small first step to reducing the undue influence of non-residential voters in the state’s most prominent council.
