Perhaps it's time the Greens stop recommending preferences to Labor?

Political campaigners often keep doing what they've always done even if a tactic no longer works. They persist with the status quo purely out of habit, or because they've become emotionally attached to out-dated arguments and perspectives.

But sometimes campaigners switch tactics because they've analysed the current landscape, thought deeply about the pros and cons of change and made an informed decision to try something new.

In Queensland's recent Stafford by-election, the local Greens campaign did exactly that, deciding to run an 'open ticket.' That means that instead of the Greens how-to-vote ('HTV') flyer suggesting a specific preferencing order, the flyer just said 'vote 1 Greens and number every box.'

The Greens HTV for the 2026 Stafford by-election

Various minor parties and independent candidates have increasingly been taking this approach in recent years. Labor even did it in the federal seat of Macnamara in the 2025 federal election.

But for the Queensland Greens it was a noteworthy strategic shift – over the past decade, the party has consistently given its supporters a specific recommended order for how they should number preferences on the ballot.

This is a typical example of a Greens HTV from the 2025 federal election - progressive minor parties are ranked higher than Labor, and Labor is ranked higher than more right-wing parties

Personally I didn't learn about the Stafford by-election open ticket until early voting had opened, and I understand local Labor campaigners actually heard about it before most of the Greens membership did.

At the time, I said I was on the fence about the decision. I wrote on Facebook, "I think it's probably the wrong call by the party, but I can see some strong persuasive arguments in favour of the move too."

The Courier Mail misreported this as me 'slamming' the Greens, which even for them was an absurdly sensationalist degree of spin.

Courier Mail headlines are frequently sensationalist and inaccurate

Three weeks down the line, having observed the public reaction to the move and the results of the by-election, I'm not ashamed to concede that I was wrong...

I've changed my mind**,** and I now think that in the current political climate, running open tickets that don't explicitly recommend preferences to Labor is something the Greens should consider doing in almost every electoral contest around the country.

My two strongest concerns about the open-ended how-to-vote flyer were:

1. If the Greens didn't explicitly encourage their supporters to direct preferences to Labor ahead of the LNP, slightly more Greens voters might preference the LNP, making it easier for the LNP to win the seat off Labor.
2. A HTV that showed empty boxes on the ballot paper might lead to more Greens voters than usual just voting 1 (even though the flyer text still said "number every box"). If someone just votes 1 and doesn't number the other boxes, their vote is declared 'informal' and isn't counted. So if Greens voters weren't paying attention and failed to fill out all the boxes, this would hurt the Greens primary vote.

In this by-election, neither of those fears materialised.

The party trusted their voters to make up their own minds, and roughly 86.5% of Greens voters ultimately preferenced Labor ahead of the LNP (slightly higher than the 83.7% of Stafford Greens voters who preferenced Labor in the 2024 state election).

Stafford by-election ultimate preference flows as reported on Antony Green's blog

Data collected by Greens scrutineers also suggested that in the entire electorate , only around 30 Greens voters (out of over 4000) just voted 1 without numbering every box on the ballot paper (and thus had their vote declared 'informal'). That rate was actually lower than for supporters of other parties – a higher percentage of Labor and LNP votes were declared informal because they didn't number all the boxes.

Every party always has a small number of supporters who ignore or misunderstand instructions, and only vote 1 without numbering every box, leading to their votes not being counted. But the Stafford result suggests that, at least for the Greens, handing out open ticket HTVs won't lead to a higher rate of informal votes due to incomplete ballot papers.

Another fear I had about the open ticket tactic was that we'd be attacked for the decision by various other political parties. That certainly happened. The Labor establishment – including various union bosses – immediately went after the Greens for this move, even though Labor has done the same thing in the recent past.

But those attacks didn't appear to hurt the Greens at all. Our 3-party-preferred vote (the proportion of voters who preferred the Greens over Labor and the LNP) was higher for this by-election than in the 2024 general election.

I'm cautious about over-generalising from the results of a single by-election. Maybe there are some electorates around Australia where Greens voters are less politically engaged, making explicit HTV guidance more important. And perhaps for upper house contests, there's a stronger case for giving voters clear recommended preference orders. But the main electoral strategy arguments against the Greens running an open HTV are starting to look very weak.

Ultimately, if the Labor party can't convince Greens voters to preference Labor ahead of the far-right Liberals, that's not the Greens' fault – it's Labor's.

Conventions can be broken

The Greens issuing an open ticket didn't actually help the LNP in practice. But much of the criticism of the Greens decision was more abstract, along the lines of "not explicitly recommending preferences is inherently wrong because it means you're telling voters that the LNP or Family First are no worse than Labor or the Socialists!" Basically these critics were claiming there's an established principle that a party must use its how-to-vote flyers to signal to its supporters which other parties most closely align with its values.

The more I thought about this argument, the less convincing I found it.

The Greens were very clearly saying to voters "we trust you to choose your own preferences" – they even printed that on their flyer.

Certainly, if the Greens had said publicly "we're not recommending an order of preferences because all the other parties are exactly the same" I'd be much more concerned. There were times in the 1990s when some Greens spokespeople did make those kinds of comments while running open tickets, and even a few occasions where they made favourable comments about the Liberals to justify not specifically recommending preferences towards Labor. I still think that was a bad approach.

But simply saying "we won't tell you who to preference" is quite obviously not the same as saying "you should preference the LNP ahead of Labor."

Related arguments that how-to-votes serve a valuable public education function by showing voters which other parties a particular candidate has most in common with also don't strike me as compelling in the case of an established party like the Greens.

Maybe if a low-profile independent is running and most voters have no idea what they stand for, their preference recommendation might reveal relevant insights about their ideological leanings. But even for independents, and certainly for the Greens, it's the other messages and policies on their campaign materials that more effectively communicate that kind of information.

The major parties certainly don't use how-to-votes to rank the other parties in order of policy alignment. Labor always preferences Greens candidates higher than the Liberals, even though in terms of overall policy positions and the direction they're taking the country, Labor in 2026 is much, much closer to the Liberals than they are to the Greens.

In reality, there are no 'principles' about what a HTV means or how it should be used beyond what political parties themselves decide.

There's no rule book or constitutional provision that says "not publishing a preference recommendation means you think all the other parties are exactly the same."

Those are just conventions that most candidates choose to follow. But just because Labor says "this is what a how-to-vote means and this is how you must use it" doesn't mean we must assent to that.

Handing out a how-to-vote flyer is simply a tactic used to achieve certain political goals.

And for the Greens in 2026, goal priorities should necessarily shift now that Labor has swung so far to the right, and is so deeply unpopular with so many voters.

The Stafford result suggests that for now at least, whether the Greens recommend preferences via how-to-vote flyers doesn't have much bearing at all on the goal of ensuring the far-right don't win more seats; the vast majority of Greens voters are choosing for themselves to preference Labor higher than the Liberals or One Nation.

But not recommending a preference order does help achieve two other important Greens goals:

1. Drawing more voters away from the major parties and One Nation, and
2. Pressuring the major parties – particularly Labor – to adopt more progressive positions in order to attract preferences from Greens voters

By distancing the Greens from Labor, an open ticket HTV wins more votes for the Greens than it loses

10 years ago, some of the biggest barriers for people who might consider voting Greens were that it was a "wasted vote" because "the Greens could never win," or that the Greens were a single-issue party who "only cared about the environment." Neither of those were true, but many voters still thought that way.

Today, those kinds of barriers come up less often. A far bigger concern for swinging voters is the idea that "a vote for the Greens is just a vote for Labor."

This message has been perpetuated by various conservative forces for years, and is now accepted at face value by millions of voters.

For the Greens, being perceived as too closely aligned with Labor is increasingly a net loss electorally. Labor's primary vote is trending downwards long-term, and the Greens risk being dragged down with them if the party doesn't make it absolutely clear that it's not Labor's lapdog.

This graph from Antony Green's blog shows how the primary vote of both the major parties is trending downwards - it doesn't show the even sharper declines in popularity since One Nation's 2026 surge

A few years ago, there was a cohort of progressive Labor voters who were open to switching to the Greens if they felt confident this wouldn't undermine Labor and strengthen the Liberals. I encountered these voters regularly when campaigning in suburbs like West End and Woolloongabba.

For that group, hearing that the Greens worked collaboratively with Labor made them feel comfortable switching from voting 1 Labor, 2 Greens to 1 Greens, 2 Labor. But those kinds of voters are now either consistently voting 1 Greens, or are more firmly sticking with Labor after Labor's relentless, disingenuous attacks that the Greens were blocking progressive reforms.

While that voter cohort matters less, there is now a much, much larger group of people who are pissed off with the entire political establishment – especially Labor. Many of these voters are turning to One Nation, but some could be convinced to vote 1 Greens if not for the party's perceived Labor affiliation.

If the Greens are seen as too close to Labor, it's harder to win over anti-establishment or socially-progressive Liberal voters who are turned off by the modern Libs' far-right positioning, but strongly dislike the ALP. But it's also harder to win over Labor voters who've become angry with Albanese and want to tell him to get stuffed.

Right now, the dominant political choice that's shaping the voting decisions of more and more Australians is not 'left vs right' but 'establishment vs anti-establishment.' The far-right understands this, and has worked to position the Greens as part of the political establishment, and specifically as an appendage of Labor.

Overturning the widespread perception that the Greens are too supportive of Labor requires a bigger, multi-pronged strategic reorientation. The Greens switching to running open tickets will not, by itself, reverse that damaging reputation. But it will probably help.

Forcing the major parties to work harder for Greens preferences

For years, Labor has benefited from consistently strong preference flows from Greens voters, in part because the Greens ordinarily encourage their supporters to preference Labor ahead of the Liberals/Nationals.

Consequently, there's little incentive for Labor to work hard to convince Greens voters to vote 2 Labor.

Labor can keep drifting to the right, chasing voters who are ideologically more aligned with the Liberals, Nationals and even One Nation, knowing that even as it loses more and more left-wing voters to the Greens, the vast majority of those votes will flow back to Labor via preferences.

But if the Greens stop actively encouraging supporters to direct preferences to Labor ahead of the Liberals, Labor starts to feel more pressure to appeal to those voters. We could see Labor adopting rhetoric and policy initiatives that are deliberately targeted to win back Greens primary votes, or at least ensure that Greens voters do still preference Labor even if their party isn't explicitly telling them to.

I should acknowledge this effect won't be as strong in the short-term. Labor strategists saw the Stafford by-election results too, and understand that a strong majority of Greens voters are currently in the habit of directing preferences to Labor regardless of what the Greens put on their HTVs.

But that habit is shaped by numerous factors including the Greens' long-running how-to-vote practices. If the party starts running open tickets more frequently, after a couple of election cycles, other parties will likely recognise that the preferences of at least some Greens voters are up for grabs, and act accordingly.

We might, for example, see urban Liberal or teal independent candidates announce the odd policy or project that's calculated to attract the preferences of Greens voters. If Labor, the Liberals and other emergent political forces start seriously competing for Greens voters' preferences, this will – in a small way – likely help shift Australia's political compass closer towards Greens policy goals.

It's very difficult to predict how significant the medium-term impact of Greens open tickets would be on Labor's political positioning, but the pushback from Labor MPs around the Stafford by-election suggests it does at least make them nervous.

Telling the right story matters

The Greens made a mistake in failing to publicly explain the open ticket decision in advance of voting opening for the by-election. There was no proactive press conference or social media comms plan. My understanding is that this was a failure on the part of the party hierarchy rather than the fault of Jess and her local campaign team.

Looking ahead, the benefits to the Greens of switching to open ticket HTVs for most elections depends heavily on how the party sells and justifies the decision. State and federal party leaders should call press conferences, line up podcast interviews and produce their own social media assets highlighting that the Greens will no longer recommend preferences to Labor, because Labor is actively hostile to Greens values and policy priorities, and the Greens are not Labor's lapdog. The story about why the Greens make this change is arguably more important than the change itself.

Of course, local Greens branches and campaigns should retain the flexibility to issue numbered HTV recommendations where that makes sense for their local context – particularly in situations where other progressive independents or minor party candidates might be able to unseat Labor or Liberal MPs if enough Greens preferences flow their way.

But a broad message of "we trust voters to make up your own minds, and we won't do secret preference deals or act as a preference funnel for any other party" sends a clear signal that the Greens are breaking with the political establishment and responding to growing public frustration with the two major parties, while reminding Labor it can't take the Greens for granted.

I'm not suggesting this one change would, by itself, draw thousands more people to the Greens or slow One Nation's rise. There's much more the party can and should be doing to win over voters who are pissed at the major parties and looking for alternatives (keep an eye out for a longer article I'm working on about that).

But right now, the Greens are stagnating, and there's no evidence that's suddenly going to change unless the party shakes up its approach. This is the time to question established conventions, throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Persisting with the status quo while One Nation surges is a recipe for Greens political irrelevancy and a brisk march towards fascism.

Establishment vibes: Do ‘extreme Greens’ criticisms hit harder when we’re no longer ‘doing politics differently’?We can’t beat them if we play by their rulesJonathan SriranganathanJonathan SriranganathanTowards a new political orientation for the GreensThe Australian Greens’ overall strategy and approach simply isn’t working as well as we need it to - so what changes should we consider?Jonathan SriranganathanJonathan Sriranganathan

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