A federal Senate candidate won his seat in 2013 with 0.51% of the primary vote, riding a preference chain negotiated entirely in back rooms. Victorian upper house rules are built on the same mechanism. We are using it to get in. Then we are legislating it out of existence.
Above-the-line voting lets parties lodge preference flows before election day. Voters who tick the box have their vote routed through chains negotiated in back rooms, often by people most voters have never heard of. The result is that parties with tiny primary votes can win seats through preference cascades no voter consented to. We lodged preference deals for exactly this reason. We are not pretending otherwise. The mechanism is broken, and the only way to break it from the inside is to use it to get there. Once we have representation, the first thing we legislate is the thing that got us in. That's the commitment. If you don't trust it, don't vote for us.
Primary vote that won a federal Senate seat via preference harvesting in 2013 -- the same mechanism Victorian upper house rules still permit
Australian Electoral Commission 2013 federal election results; Victorian Electoral Commission rules comparison
What it does
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Voter-controlled preferences
Voters decide exactly where their preferences go, not backroom political brokers.
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End preference harvesting
Parties are prevented from using complex preference cascades to win seats with minimal votes.
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True democratic representation
Elected upper house members accurately reflect the direct choices of the voters.
Yes, we made preference deals. We are using a broken system to get into the room where we can fix it. Call that hypocrisy if you want. We call it the only path that actually works.
Further Detail
Design Rationale
Victoria's preferential voting system gives candidates and parties the ability to direct how their voters' preferences flow if they are eliminated, through "how to vote" cards and registered group voting tickets in the upper house. Preference deals between parties are negotiated privately, often with significant financial considerations, and are typically opaque to voters. The structural conflict of interest is that the major parties benefit from preference flows that keep the two-party system intact, while smaller parties trade preferences for campaign support or fundraising assistance. Fusion is using preference deals in the 2026 election specifically to win a Legislative Council seat from which to abolish them, which is the central tension this policy must state honestly rather than obscure.
System Interaction
The Electoral Act 2002 (Vic) governs how-to-vote card registration and group voting ticket requirements for the upper house. Abolishing preference deals in their current form requires either: (1) moving to optional preferential voting in the lower house, removing the compulsion to number every box that makes how-to-vote cards so valuable; (2) legislating full disclosure of any financial or in-kind consideration paid in connection with a preference agreement, the same disclosure requirements that apply to political donations; or (3) abolishing the group voting ticket mechanism in the upper house, requiring above-the-line voters to number parties directly rather than accepting a party's nominated preference sequence. Each of these requires an amendment to the Electoral Act.
Economic & Institutional Logic
The economic case for transparency is straightforward: voters cannot make informed decisions about preference flows if the financial basis of those flows is not disclosed. The broader democratic cost is harder to quantify but is documented in the rise of preference-harvesting parties, parties registered primarily to collect preferences and channel them to a paying major party, which have won Victorian upper house seats despite receiving negligible primary votes. The counterfactual value of a preference deal to a major party is the difference in seat probability with and without the flow, which can be modelled but is not publicly disclosed by any party to any preference agreement.
Risk & Failure Modes
The direct conflict of interest: Fusion is running preference deals in 2026 to win a seat from which to abolish them. This is an honest tension that the policy should name rather than finesse. If Fusion wins the seat partly through preference flows, any subsequent bill to abolish or regulate those flows is open to the criticism that the mechanism that delivered the seat is being pulled up behind the victors. The policy's answer is that the existing system is corrupt regardless of who uses it, and that winning a seat to change the system from inside is the only viable path from outside it. The risk is that this argument is not accepted by other parties, or by voters, and that the reform fails even from a position of holding a balance-of-power seat.
Evidence & Precedent
The 2013 Victorian upper house election saw the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party candidate Ricky Muir elected to the federal Senate with 0.51% of the primary vote, entirely through a complex preference deal chain. Switzerland's federal elections use an open-list proportional representation system in which voters can distribute preferences across lists from different parties, with no centralised preference deal mechanism: this does not map cleanly onto Victoria's system but illustrates that preferential and proportional systems can be designed to reflect voter preferences rather than party negotiation. Ireland's single transferable vote system requires voters to express their own preferences in order, with no how-to-vote card infrastructure comparable to Australia's.
Implementation Outline
This is a crossbench-leverage policy with an acknowledged conflict of interest: Fusion is using preference deals in 2026 to win the seat from which it proposes to abolish them. That tension is named explicitly rather than obscured. From one seat, the Fusion MP introduces a Private Member's Bill amending the Electoral Act 2002 in two stages: first, require full public disclosure of any financial or in-kind consideration paid in connection with a preference agreement, registered as a political donation under the existing disclosure regime (this is the least controversial ask and is designed to attract cross-party support); second, abolish the Legislative Council group voting ticket mechanism in favour of optional preferential voting above the line, mirroring the 2016 Commonwealth Senate reform. The disclosure stage can pass from one seat with the support of parties that benefit from preference transparency even if they oppose abolition. The abolition stage requires a parliamentary majority but the one-seat deliverable is putting a fully drafted bill on the record, forcing every party to state publicly whether they support the current undisclosed preference-deal system.
This policy won't pass itself.