A rightwing provocateur’s plan to register the “Free Palestine party” and use it to funnel votes to conservative parties in Victoria’s state election has renewed concern over the state’s voting system.
Avi Yemini, a former Israeli soldier and self-styled investigative journalist who creates content for his YouTube channel, Rebel News Australia, on Tuesday announced plans to register the party, which he said would “flow our preferences on to parties that want to free Palestine from Hamas” in the November poll.
He said he had been inspired by the anti-lockdown activist Monica Smit, who in February announced she would seek to register the “Save the Environment party” to influence the election result.
Yemini and Smit’s plans rely on the Victoria’s upper house remaining the only house of parliament in Australia still using the group voting ticket system (GVTs), in which voters are only able to choose one party above the line on the ballot paper. The voters’ preferences are then allocated by the party if it is knocked out during counting.
The system has allowed backroom deals between parties to flourish, with some candidates getting elected with only a minuscule number of primary votes. The most prominent player is Glenn Druery, the so-called “preference whisperer”.
In his video, Yemini said Smit’s party would “take voters” from the left and “redistribute their votes back to conservative parties”.
“It inspired me and got me thinking, what’s the one issue that unites all useful idiots, from the far left to the fringe right to certain immigrant cultures that have imported their hate? Who? Free Palestine,” he said.
“Imagine they walked into a polling booth and they saw Free Palestine party. It’s genius. I am launching the Free Palestine party and we are going to redistribute, we’re going to flow our preferences on to parties that want to free Palestine from Hamas.”
Yemini said he was seeking members to join the party so he could register with the Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC). He claimed Victoria was the only state left with GVTs as they had benefited the Labor party.
But the Labor-led electoral matters committee in its 2022 election review called for GVTs to be scrapped. It ordered a separate inquiry into GVTs, which in December called on the government to implement the 2022 recommendation “as soon as possible, so that the new voting system will apply at the 2026 state election”.
The VEC told the inquiry it could only implement changes to GVTs in time for the election if the bill was introduced and passed by August.
The move is also supported by the Liberal party and the Greens, whose leader, Ellen Sandell, criticised Labor for failing to act.
“Group voting tickets are seriously dodgy,” Sandell said on Wednesday. “How can Labor condone a voting system that allows people to be tricked into voting for a party with a fake name that is completely opposed to their values?
“If Labor doesn’t abolish dodgy group voting tickets, they’re letting deceitful far-right political parties buy seats in parliament and essentially handing the upper house over to the far right.”
Three Labor MPs, unauthorised to speak publicly, said there was strong support within the caucus to abolish GVTs as they were an integrity risk. The party has delayed upper-house preselections as it waits for an outcome.
One MP said the premier, Jacinta Allan, had appeared reluctant to do so as it would benefit One Nation.
Druery said if Labor scrapped GVTs, and recent polling was replicated at the November election, One Nation could win between 13 and 16 upper-house seats.
He declined to say who he was working with before the state election but said he was “proud” to have been working to direct micro-party preferences away from One Nation since 1999.
“I am happy to say I will use all my expertise, my contacts, my experience, to do my best to stop any racists, cookers or crazies from getting into the Victorian parliament,” Druery said.
Pauline Hanson told 10News+ One Nation would “gladly welcome” preferences from Yemini’s party, though she believed it would be better to “get rid” of GVTs and “allow voters to control their preferences”.
One Nation’s Victorian president, Warren Pickering, said it had been the party’s position to scrap GVTs since 2022 and described them as a “subversion of the democratic process” that was not well understood by voters.
A government spokesperson said the registration of political parties was a matter for the VEC. They said the government was still considering the recommendations of the electoral matters committee on GVTs and would respond in due course.
A VEC spokesperson said all applications to register a political party were assessed in accordance with the legislative requirements in the Electoral Act. They said as part of the process any person who believed the application should be refused could submit an objection.
Reasons to object include an incorrect application, an obscene party name, or if the name or logo is not allowable. However, the spokesperson said an “objection cannot be raised on the grounds that a party’s name does not express the party’s ‘true’ character or that the party’s policies are objectionable”.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
