Victoria Ends Group Voting Tickets, Reshaping Its Upper House Elections
Victoria's Legislative Council voted 33 to four on Tuesday 11 August 2026 to pass the Electoral Amendment (Miscellaneous Matters) Bill 2026, abolishing group voting tickets (GVTs) for the upper house. The change takes effect immediately for the November state election. Victoria was the last Australian upper house still using the system, which election analyst Antony Green said had allowed roughly 20 candidates over the past decade to win seats with under 6% of the vote, some with as little as 1% (The Guardian).
Under the new rules, voters marking a ballot above the line must number at least five parties in order of preference. GVTs previously allowed parties to direct preference flows on behalf of voters who marked only a single "1" above the line, meaning the party — not the voter — decided where the vote went next. The Parliament of Victoria confirmed the bill removes GVTs from Legislative Council elections and prescribes the new above-the-line voting method (Parliament of Victoria Hansard).
The federal Senate abolished GVTs in 2016, and New South Wales had already done so at the state level. A Victorian parliamentary inquiry into the 2018 state election noted that distortions in New South Wales and Commonwealth upper houses diminished after GVTs were eliminated (Parliament of Victoria). An earlier inquiry from 2014 had stated that removing GVTs would simplify voting and prevent the distortions they caused (Parliament of Victoria).
The four MPs who voted against the bill were Georgie Purcell (Animal Justice Party), Rachel Payne (Legalise Cannabis), David Limbrick (Libertarian), and Jeff Bourman (Shooters, Fishers and Farmers). Purcell said the changes significantly decrease her chances of re-election. She, Payne, and Limbrick had argued they would support abolishing GVTs only if the government also scrapped Victoria's eight upper-house regions and replaced them with a single statewide electorate of 40 seats (The Guardian).
That counterproposal was not taken up. The government instead opted for a targeted reform, removing GVTs while leaving the eight-region structure intact.
The legislation's path through parliament was comparatively compressed. Anthony Carbines tabled statements of compatibility in the Legislative Assembly on 29 July 2026 (Parliament of Victoria). The Legislative Council debated the bill on 29 and 30 July, with speeches by Ingrid Stitt and Evan Mulholland (Parliament of Victoria Hansard). The final vote came less than two weeks later. The Electoral Matters Committee had recommended eliminating GVTs and allowing multiple preferences in a report dated December 2025 (Parliament of Victoria), and the government signaled its intention to abolish GVTs in a June 2026 Hansard record covering the Electoral Further Amendment Bill (Parliament of Victoria Hansard).
The broader context here is a decade-long debate over how proportional representation should function in Victoria's upper house. GVTs enabled complex preference-harvesting arrangements among micro-parties, where a cluster of parties could pool preferences to elect a candidate from within their grouping regardless of that candidate's primary vote. Think of it as a relay race: instead of each runner finishing their own leg, parties could pass the baton to allies, accumulating enough combined votes to win a seat even if no single party had strong support. This produced results that were mathematically valid under the rules but democratically questionable to many observers. Green's figure of roughly 20 candidates elected with under 6% over the past decade gives a concrete sense of scale. The new system shifts the preference-direction burden from parties to voters, who must now express at least five preferences themselves rather than delegating that task through a single mark.
For the micro-party MPs who benefited from GVT-mediated preference flows, the change is existential. Purcell's assessment that her re-election chances have significantly decreased is a straightforward reading of the arithmetic: without ticket-directed preferences funneling votes across party lines, candidates need broader primary support or voter-directed preference flows to reach a quota. The crossbench's proposed alternative, a single 40-member statewide electorate, would have preserved proportionality for small parties through a lower effective quota threshold across the entire state. Its rejection means micro-parties must now compete within the existing eight-region structure, each electing five members, without the preference-pooling mechanism that previously amplified their reach.
The reform aligns Victoria with the approach taken by the federal Senate and New South Wales, both of which moved away from GVTs after concerns about preference-harvesting distortions. Whether the November election produces a more straightforward relationship between primary vote share and seat outcomes, or whether new strategic behaviors emerge under the mandatory five-preference requirement, will be the first real test of the revised system.
