Without a vote being cast, the future shape of Victoria’s legislative council has gone a long way to being decided following Sunday’s deadline for lodgement of group voting tickets.

As in the federal Senate, these tickets allow the parties to determine preferences for the overwhelming majority of voters who choose the easy option of numbering a single box above the line.



Not so long ago, this was an arcane aspect of the Australian electoral process noted only by those with a professional interest in the matter.



That began to change when Labor’s Victorian preference strategy at the 2004 federal election short-circuited, putting Steve Fielding of Family First into the Senate at the expense of the Greens.



Then came last year’s Senate election, when the efforts of preference manipulators caused a bewildered public to be presented with tablecloth-sized ballot papers, followed by a series of incomprehensible results.



With much the same system in place for Victoria’s state upper house, a lot of the energy of the campaign over the past week has been spent on jockeying for preference deals.



For the Coalition, which emerged from the 2010 election with an upper house majority of 21 seats out of 40, this has been a fairly straightforward matter. The gambit of putting the Greens in last place decisively energised their campaign last time, and it comes as no surprise that they have opted to do so again.



Things are quite a bit more fraught on the left, where preference strategies serve as a flashpoint in the age-old struggle between purity and pragmatism.



Purporting to represent the former ideal, the Greens have been crying foul over Labor’s refusal to agree to an across-the-board preference swap, invoking the spectre of a legislature held hostage by religious fanatics and environmental vandals.



From Labor’s perspective, such an arrangement would have been a millstone around its neck as it sought deals with other parties, while also handing a rhetorical weapon to the Coalition in its bid to win over anti-Greens swinging voters.



The advantages of a Greens preference deal were correspondingly slight. Regardless of what how-to-vote cards might suggest, Labor can rest assured that Greens voters will overwhelmingly favour them over the Coalition when forced to rank every candidate in the lower house, as the compulsory preferential voting system demands.



Nor would Labor suffer sleepless nights over the prospect of the Greens placing left-wing parties ahead of them for the upper house. By the time Greens preferences are distributed, such parties are almost certain to have dropped out of the count.

Consequently, any retaliation the Greens might wish to inflict must involve sacrificing their claim to the moral high ground by pursuing strategies not a whole lot different from Labor’s.



And sure enough, it turns out the Palmer United party (PUP), fresh from its role in scuttling the carbon and mining taxes, has had its moribund campaign re-energised by an act of generosity from the Greens.

The PUP stands to receive Greens preferences ahead of Labor in four of the eight five-member upper house regions, including the three country regions together with south-eastern metropolitan.



It is presumably no coincidence that the PUP has the Greens ahead of Labor in every region, and ahead of the Coalition in half of them.



For Labor’s part, four of its eight tickets place the Greens behind competitive non-left candidates from the PUP, the Country Alliance and the Democratic Labour Party.



In the country regions especially, it’s entirely possible that one or more of these decisions will lead to a repeat of the result in the western Victoria upper house region at the 2006 election, when the DLP won a seat because Labor put them ahead of the Greens, just as they are doing there now.



It should be noted that Victorian voters who would sooner not have their votes corralled by back-room preference negotiators have a much lower hurdle to clear than they do at a federal election.



Whereas Senate elections require that below-the-line voters rank an ever-increasing number of candidates, the system in Victoria allows for a minimum of five boxes to be numbered, beyond which votes can drop out of the count.



So far though, it appears the imperative for most is to discharge their democratic duty and get on with their weekends as quickly as possible. The rate of above-the-line voting at the 2010 state election was 96% – barely different from the 97.3% rate for the Senate last year.



Unless the example of the Senate result has prompted a change of attitudes, there is a strong possibility that this upper house result will prove every bit as perverse as the last.



William Bowe is the publisher of the electoral studies blog, The Poll Bludger, on the Crikey website.

