(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

When the ASX last had a physical presence in Melbourne in the early 2000s, keen investors would show up to the ground floor of GPT’s grand office tower at 530 Collins Street and watch the latest share prices blinking on the big screens.

Fast-forward 20 years to a cloudy Sunday morning yesterday, and it was a very different type of number-cruncher gathered to place their bets on Victoria’s upper house election taking place on November 26.

Noon yesterday was the deadline for every party to register their dreaded “group voting tickets” up at the Victorian Electoral Commission offices on level 11 of 530 Collins Street. And with the full candidates’ lists and ballot draws only completed on Friday, it was a frenetic 30 hours of negotiation and form-filling to get the job done before the deadline.

I spent a couple of hours in the foyer yesterday watching the play, and the party secretaries were generally shaking their heads, saying this had been the most complicated, convoluted and hard-to-read set of upper house micro-party negotiations they had ever endured.

However, when you read through all the group voting tickets — neatly summarised by Antony Green on his ABC website last night — it quickly becomes apparent that the Glenn Druery preferences wheel will come close to matching the nine minor party victories it delivered in 2018.

The biggest change this time is that sacked Liberal MP Bernie Finn and sacked Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek are both set for another four years in the upper house as newly minted Druery clients, courtesy of being candidates for the anti-abortion Democratic Labour Party. The club-busting Druery system is now resurrecting discarded major party players rather than introducing fresh minor party talent.

Somyurek has an extraordinary flow of preferences in the Northern Metropolitan region from the likes of Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party; the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party; and the Liberal Democrats. And at this point he is favoured to defeat incumbent Fiona Patten from the Reason Party, formerly known as the Sex Party.

While Patten will receive preferences from any Green or Labor quota surpluses, plus from the Victorian Socialists, Animal Justice, and Legalise Cannabis Australia parties, the Druery firepower backing Somyurek ahead of Reason spans at least 10 minor and micro parties, plus the Liberals.

Surely after five rounds of this in the Victorian upper house — since the Bracks government introduced proportional representation across eight upper house regions for the 2006 election — 2022 will be the last time preference flows will be left in the hands of party secretaries. Isn’t it time to let the voters decide? Let’s call it the Somyurek amendment.

Druery called Crikey last night after analysing the group voting tickets and predicted he would deliver eight MPs, including incumbents such as Jeff Bourman from the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party in Eastern Victoria; Rob Barton from Transport Matters Party in the Eastern Metropolitan region; and Liberal Democrats MP David Limbrick.

He also reckons Animal Justice candidate Georgie Purcell will prevail in Northern Victoria even though her party secretary Ben Schultz reneged on his agreement at the death and looped in with the Greens and Fiona Patten.

However, Druery’s pay-to-play system always has winners and losers, and its looks like Animal Justice Party incumbent Andy Meddick will struggle to get back in Western Victoria — as will Clifford Hayes from Sustainable Australia in Southern Metropolitan, where the Greens are likely to win a second seat.

The Druery formula has always been to break down the left-right ideological divide and get the minor and micro parties committed to all preferencing one another before going to the majors, which includes the Greens.

It worked a treat in 2018 when the Greens achieved an average 10% upper house vote across Victoria, but saw their upper house numbers slashed from five to a solitary member, party leader Samantha Ratnam. As a great hater of the Greens, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews loved the outcome.

ABC election analyst Antony Green was just starting to analyse the group voting tickets when Crikey called last night and was happy to reiterate his view that the system is an embarrassing farce.

“NSW did away with the system in 2003, the Senate in 2016, South Australia in 2018 and Western Australia this year. Victoria has bizarrely chosen to retain a system of back-room preference harvesting deals, which continues to elect parties and candidates who get tiny votes that would not see them elected in any other voting system in the democratic world,” Green told Crikey.

Green said the best indicator of the unfairness of the system is what’s called the “losing party ratio”, which measures the ratio of the last elected party’s primary vote compared with what the losing party achieved.

In the 2018 Victorian election, this ratio blew out to 14 times for the benefit of former taxi driver Rod Barton, whose Transport Matters Party achieved a tiny primary vote of just 0.62% in the Eastern Melbourne region, but still defeated the Greens with a primary vote of 9%.

The highest-ever losing party ratios have come out of WA, where the Australian Sports Party was initially elected to the Senate in 2013 with a primary vote of just 0.2% — or some 50 times less than Labor.

The WA Parliament has now abolished the farcical group-voting-tickets system after Druery played a blinder there in 2021, delivering an upper seat to the Daylight Saving Party where the lead candidate, Wilson Tucker, only scored a primary vote of 98 votes or 0.23%.

At first Tucker wasn’t keen to give up his Silicon Valley tech job and return to Perth to take his seat in Parliament, but decided to in the end, mainly because his mother was number two on the ticket and would have won the seat on a countback, even though she didn’t receive any primary votes at all.