The Liberal party will get Labor preferences in three rural seats to help fend off threats from Nationals candidates as part of a deal in which the Liberals will preference Labor ahead of the Greens in inner-city seats where those preferences would have given the Greens a chance of defeating Labor MPs.



The deal struck between the major parties means Labor will preference the Liberals over the Nationals in the Victorian seat of Murray and the West Australian seats of O’Connor and Durack, strongly improving the Liberal candidates’ chances. But it is a blow to the Greens’ lower house campaign.

It had been widely speculated that the Liberals could do a deal with the Greens to disadvantage Labor, something openly canvassed by the Liberals’ Victorian state secretary, Michael Kroger, but opposed by the federal director, Tony Nutt, and the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull.

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On Sunday Turnbull promised to preference Labor ahead of the Greens in every House of Representatives seat, making the decision part of his pitch to voters that they should avoid voting for minor parties in the interests of political stability.

“This is a call that I have made in the national interest,” he said. “Let us be quite clear about this. The big risk at this election is that we would end up with an unstable, chaotic, minority Labor-Green-independent government as we have seen before.”



The quid pro quo from Labor in that deal is the ALP agreement to preference the Liberals over the Nationals in the three regional seats.

The retirement of the Liberal Sharman Stone has set the stage for a fierce three-cornered contest in Murray, northern Victoria. Stone held the seat by 20.9%. The Liberals are running Duncan McGauchie as their candidate and the Nationals are fielding a former state MP, Damian Drum.

The Liberals hold O’Connor, in the rural south of Western Australia, by 15.3%. It was considered to be a relatively close contest between the sitting member, Rick Wilson and the Nationals’ new candidate, farmer John Hassell. Labor putting Wilson ahead of Hassell on its how-to-vote cards makes Wilson’s position more secure.

The Liberal Melissa Price holds the sprawling WA electorate of Durack by 15.2% but the contest is also far closer against the Nationals candidate, the party’s state treasurer, Lisa Cole.

The deal is good news for the Labor MPs running in the inner-city seats, including Anthony Albanese in Grayndler, Tanya Plibersek in Sydney, David Feeney in Batman and Peter Khalil in Wills.

The Labor frontbencher Brendan O’Connor told Sky News the deal would help Feeney in Batman where it is under grave threat from the Greens’ candidate Alex Bhathal. “Of course David Feeney should be returned,” O’Connor said. “He’s got a lot of contributions to make to any Labor government.

“Any opportunities for preferences to flow to your candidates you will always be happy with, of course. But as I say, the deeper questions for the Australian electorate aren’t really the preference flows of political parties, they’re the decisions made by the two major parties and, as I’ve said, Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Liberal party has shifted to the right.”



Turnbull said he had made the decision to preference Labor ahead of the Greens after consulting Tony Nutt, the Liberals’ federal director.

Under the now-defunct idea of a Liberal/Greens “arrangement”, the Liberals would have put the Greens ahead of Labor in some seats where the Greens are hoping to unseat Labor MPs, including Grayndler and Sydney, the regional New South Wakes seat of Richmond and the inner Melbourne seats of Batman and Wills. The strategy was to divert Labor resources to these seats rather than the outer-suburban seats where they are fighting the Liberals. In those seats the Greens would run “open tickets”.

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Kroger had also canvassed the idea on Sky News, saying the Greens were “not the nutters they used to be.”

“I think it’s unlikely that in this modern era that you actually do a preference deal with anyone much,” he said. “You may have loose arrangements with various parties.

“You’ve got a doctor [Di Natale] who owns a farm who doesn’t come from this mad environmental background. He’s helped the government get legislation through the federal parliament. So you look at the Greens through a slightly different lens these days because they’re not the nutters they used to be.”

The Greens leader, Richard Di Natale, severely criticised Bill Shorten on Sunday, saying the Labor leader must now apologise for lying to voters about a supposed “deal” between the Liberal party and the Greens.

“What we know now, is the deal was always between Labor and Liberal, and what they tried to do was to lie to the Australian people, to disguise the fact that they were keen on returning a Turnbull government,” he said.

“I have called Bill Shorten today, and I have asked him to take down any of that misleading material, those billboards, the online advertising, the leaflets that have sent to people, lying about a potential deal, when the only deal that we now know of is a deal between the Labor party and the Liberal party. And if he has any integrity, he will apologise for making those outrageous, misleading and untrue statements about preferences.”

The preference deals needed to be concluded in time to print how-to-vote cards for early voting, which starts on Tuesday. Both the Liberal and Labor parties have been contacted for comment.

• Join Lenore Taylor and Katharine Murphy in Sydney and Melbourne as they host our Guardian Live election special event featuring a panel of prominent political guests