Council election regulations disallowed
1. The Legislative Council disallowed the council election regulations in 2016.
2. According to Samantha Dunn, the Greens supported the disallowance of the set of council election regulations because a review of the voting system had shown a great number of ‘dummy’ candidates (people who don’t want to be elected, but who stand for election just so they can try to take votes away from another party). These candidates then tell their supporters to preference the person they really want to be elected. She argued that publishing preference instructions would not stop this, and pointed out that the Government’s own review had found the same thing.
3. Natalie Hutchins said that the Liberals could have made the change when they were in government but did not. She said that disallowing the regulations just before the VEC mailed out postal vote packs had the potential to cause significant disruption and was unfair to everyone involved.