Minor parties have drawn up a war plan to target Coalition and Greens candidates in lower house marginal seats if the Turnbull government proceeds with Senate voting changes.
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Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was forced on Wednesday to hose down talk his government is poised to scrap the Senate preference-swap system – a move that would in effect prevent the election of micro-party senators such as Ricky Muir, who won a seat despite receiving a tiny fraction of the primary vote.
The introduction of a system in which preference deals between parties would be scrapped and voters would instead be allowed to preference a handful of candidates "above the line" would likely have to be achieved through a deal between the Coalition and the Greens.
Labor dropped its support for voting reforms earlier this year amid evidence the Coalition would be the big winner if changes are enacted.
Fairfax Media has learnt that the minor party alliance has discussed ways to hit back at the Liberal Party and Greens through an expensive tilt at lower house seats where their influence could hamper the chances of those parties.
Left-wing micro-parties would line up to contest the seat of Melbourne, held by the Greens' only member of the House of Representatives, Adam Bandt, and right-leaning micro-parties would challenge Liberal and candidates in ten marginal seats where there is the best chance of influencing the result.
A list has been drawn up which includes the Victorian seats of La Trobe and Deakin and NSW marginals Barton, Reid and Banks. Teresa Gambaro in Brisbane and Ken Wyatt in the West Australian seat of Hasluck would also be targeted by minor-party candidates.
Graham Askey, a member of the Renewable Energy Party who formerly led preference negotiations for the Hemp Party, confirmed that micro-parties had met to discuss a plan to impede the Greens and the Coalition at the next election.
He said the group wanted to "put a shot across the bows" of the parties if they were thinking of moving ahead with changes.
"We can understand why the Coalition would want these reforms because they would be entrenched with the balance of power in the Senate, but we can't understand why the Greens would be supportive," he said.
Fairfax Media reported in May that the Greens, while publicly calling for electoral reforms, are split internally on the merits of dumping the preference-swap system. For example, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young was re-elected due only to minor party preferences.
NSW senator David Leyonhjelm has branded the voting changes being advocated by new Special Minister of State Mal Brough a "brain fart" and threatened to go to war with the government in response.
Fairfax Media reported on Tuesday that some crossbenchers had told Mr Turnbull that votes narrowly lost under Tony Abbott and Eric Abetz, who was government leader in the Senate, including the re-establishment of the building industry watchdog and a new body to regulate unions, could be reversed if the relationship between the government and the crossbench improved.
Mr Turnbull, who has rung crossbenchers in a bid to soothe the angst, insisted on Wednesday that there were no specific plans to move reforms before the next election, saying Senator Muir was "as democratically and constitutionally elected to this place as I am as the member for Wentworth".
But he did say he understood the concern of some that the system had been "gamed" by the micro-parties.
