Below you can find our preference list along with a short explanation of our choices.

1. Future Party
2. Wikileaks
3. Building Australia Party
4. Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP)
5. Secular Party
6. Bullet Train for Australia
7. Australian Independents Party
8. Senator Online
9. Stop CSG
10. Drug Law Reform Party
11. Sex Party
12. Animal Justice Party
13. Wang, Tom (unaffiliated group AG)
14. Carers Alliance
15. Australian Democrats
16. Voluntary Euthanasia Party
17. The Greens
18. Liberal Democrats (LDP)
19. Pirate Party*
20. Labor **
21. Liberal/Nationals **
22. Palmer United Party
23. Socialist Alliance
24. Socialist Equality
25. Shooters and Fishers
26. Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party
27. Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party
28. Australian Republicans
29. Smokers Rights Party
30. Stable Population Party
31. Non-custodial Parents Party
32. Katter’s Australia Party
33. Democratic Labor Party
34. Family First
35. Uniting Australia Party
36. Stop the Greens
37. No Carbon Tax / Climate Skeptics
38. Australian Protectionist Party
39. Whelan, Andrew (unaffiliated group F) ***
40. Ungrouped candidates***
41. Australian Voice Party
42. Christian Democrat Party (Fred Nile Group)
43. One Nation
44. Rise Up Australia
45. Australia First

The group ticket was determined on the basis of three criteria:

• Policy and values overlap
• Negotiated preference deals.
• A bias toward smaller parties over large parties

To see every party’s official preferences for the NSW Senate seat, click here.

Notes on some of the specific choices within this list:

* The Pirate Party told us they would not be doing preference deals and were instead having a vote of the membership to determine the group ticket, which they would publish on their website. This was certainly a decision we could respect as the Group Ticketing system is fundamentally flawed and undemocratic, with a high degree of incentive toward tactical voting and backroom deals. Accordingly at their request we wrote an open letter to their membership pointing out the high degree of policy overlap we had and offering to unilaterally preference them as least as high as they voted to preference us. However as the end of the draw on Friday, less than 24 hours before close of group ticket lodgements, they had not apparently had a vote, or decided on a preference list by other means. Hence we ultimately preferenced them lower than we had originally intended.

** The choice of how to preference the major parties was not a light one. Unfortunately under Abbott’s leadership the small l liberal aspect of the Coalition has been strongly de-emphasised and conservatism has become front and centre. Furthermore the Coalition’s primary message now almost entirely concerns managerial competence and not policy ambition, which may be a legitimate case to make regarding the house of representatives but has no role in the Senate. Their economics have been almost entirely populist rather than liberal, and of course exploiting xenophobia against asylum seekers for electoral gain is antithetical to Future Party values. On many major issues where the Coalition does have stated policy, it stands in direct opposition to our own, for instance, carbon pricing and the NBN. We also had to consider the likelihood of a Coalition victory in the lower house and the advantages of a Senate acting as a counterbalance to the government of the day.

*** Our basic methodology in distributing preferences beyond groups we had deals with was to first split the parties into “tiers” and then rank them within those tiers. In the case of both the unendorsed and ungrouped candidates we had no way of evaluating what they stood for and thus erred on the side of caution, ranking them behind all other tiers bar the last one. The exception was the “AG” column unendorsed group, headed by Tom Wang. We spoke to a representative of theirs in person at the ballot draw and therefore were able to form a (favourable) view on their policy platform.

We ranked individual candidates from each party in the order printed on the ticket (top down); for the ungrouped candidates we ranked them bottom up, on an ‘anti-donkey’ vote principle.