Before the Turnbull government coaxed through reforms to the Senate, the freakish nature of the Federal Upper House was regularly compared to the bar scene in Star Wars.

Those reforms kicked in for the first time in the half-Senate election in last month’s Federal poll. The changes worked a treat and the Morrison Government now finds itself with a manageable cross bench and an easier path to passing legislation.

Now there’s another push to call last drinks on some of the less than democratic practices of WA’s very own wretched hive of villainy — the Legislative Council. Rewind to March and this column reported on a campaign by a group of a dozen Perth-based academics to drag WA’s embarrassingly dated State political system kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

The campaign, led by the likes of Notre Dame Professor Martin Drum and the University of WA’s Professor Ben Reilly, targeted four key areas of reform.

The first demand was that WA dump its shocking system of “extreme” malapportionment in the Upper House — said to be the worst in the country — that essentially values one vote in the bush as being equal to six in the city.

This imbalance gets worse every year as populations in the bush shrink and metropolitan areas grow.

Another plea went to WA’s opaque political donation disclosure laws which allow MPs to wait over a year to publish who has been giving them cash, usually well after some donations-related scandal has blown over. The academic group also wanted a loophole closed that allows political parties to send postal vote applications to voters amid suggestions some parties could be destroying returned ballots.

The fourth demand centred on the need for voting ticket reform in the Legislative Council, calling for similar changes to those now in place in the Senate.

The current system effectively presents voters with an all-or-nothing choice — they either select a single party above the line and hand over all control of preferences to the party they vote for, or chance their arm in attempting to fill in every single box below the line to dictate exactly where their preferences land.

Voters need to get every box right. Stuff it up and the entire ballot is binned.

Together with the malapportionment of weighting between country and city areas, the current ticket voting system exemplifies the worst of WA’s own unique brand of “democracy”.

As well as voters losing control over preferences, ticket voting enables parties and micro parties to game the system. Before the last State election The West reported how one micro party had openly admitted that more than a third of Upper House independent candidates contesting the poll were all in league as part of an elaborate preference harvesting arrangement.

The 2017 State election saw almost double the number of people running for a Legislative Council seat as at the 2013 election, with many of those new candidates running with the aim of gaming preferences.

Voters meanwhile were presented with massively unwieldy ballots.

Punters in the South Metropolitan region were faced with a mind-bending spreadsheet of 58 candidates.

Today the Legislative Council debate gets under way on a Bill to overhaul the Upper House ticket, dumping ticket voting and introducing a system of optional preferential voting above the line or partial preferential voting below the line. The Bill has been brought on by Green Alison Xamon but in a rare alignment of stars the Liberals, the Nationals, One Nation and the Sporting Shooters and Fishers all look likely to lend their support — meaning the laws should pass the Upper House.

Until now the McGowan Government has refused to bargain on Upper House reform unless the issue of city-country weighting is addressed — something that will never happen as long as the WA Nationals draw breath.

The Government is also wary of upsetting Liberal Democrat MLC Aaron Stonehouse, who was elected with preferences after winning just over 3 per cent of the primary vote.

Government negotiator in the Upper House Stephen Dawson says the Government will oppose the Bill, but is “open to further opportunities for electoral reform in due course”.

It would be a great shame if the McGowan Government passed up this opportunity to bring some badly needed reforms to State Parliament.

Future governments would have an easier time in meeting their legislative agenda. And voters would surely thank them for it.