We just forced a historic change to Victoria's electoral laws, and helped clear the way for fairer, more democratic elections than the ones run under the old preference racket.

Group voting tickets are gone. Labor did not suddenly discover a conscience about democracy. We used their own system against them until keeping it became too dangerous to defend.

Preferential voting itself is not the problem. Under that system, a ballot can still mean something if a first choice fails. Group voting tickets were different. A vote above the line handed the rest of your preferences to the party machine, which then decided where the ballot travelled. For roughly two decades the left exploited that machinery with slogan parties that carried almost no primary support, stacking tiny percentages into upper-house seats on less than one per cent of the vote. One Nation could walk in with nine, 10 or 12 per cent and still be locked out, even though the quota is sixteen per cent. The chamber was being filled by preference engineering, not by anything that looked like a fair reflection of who Victorians actually backed.

The so-called Preference Whisperer was open about the product he sold: prop up Labor, especially by resisting reform of the tickets, and put One Nation last. Those same micro-parties also gave Labor a way to cut deals without constantly bargaining with the Greens.

I decided to play that game better than they did. At the last election, Sack Dan Andrews funnelled angry votes straight back to Labor: the banner said one thing, the preferences said another. So I called Ezra, explained how the tickets worked, and we launched the Free Palestine Party. The idea was one banner the useful idiots would chase, from the far left to the fringe right to Islamists, with preferences aimed at One Nation. Take a point from them and give it to the right, and you have effectively doubled it.

I asked for 750 members because we needed a buffer to meet the Victorian Electoral Commission's eligibility criteria. We hit a thousand in two days, then lodged straight away.

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That is when the meltdown began. GetUp, the Greens and the ABC treated honesty as the scandal. I am normally banned from the national broadcaster, yet Raf Epstein suddenly wanted me on air to accuse me of tricking voters. I asked whether left-wing voters are so dull they will vote on a slogan alone, and whether those same voices cried foul when Sack Dan Andrews ran the preference play for Labor. Do not hate the player. Hate the game.

The VEC told the media there was nothing legally wrong with what we had done. My offence, in their eyes, was saying the plan out loud.

A by-election then delayed our paperwork and opened a window for a rival Free Palestine Party to race us for the name. We put Justin Quill on it, with SaveVictoria.com covering the legal bill, while objections poured in. We still got there first. The VEC named me president: former IDF marksman, official leader of the Free Palestine Party.

Within hours of that notification, it was reported that Labor was introducing a bill to abolish group voting tickets. Abolition had always been the ultimate goal. If they refused, we were ready to run the preferences. I would rather election day mean what the ballot says.

The bill cleared the lower house with no serious objection, a rare show of unity for a chamber that usually treats me as the most divisive figure in the country. In the upper house, those who had lived off the preference racket did not even try to defend it. They wanted the change delayed until after November. During the debate, Limbrick asked whether the Free Palestine Party's registration had forced the government's sudden rush. The minister said no and pointed instead to old Electoral Matters Committee reports that had sat unused for years. Outside Parliament, the media and GetUp played down or denied our role. The Age blurred the timeline, and GetUp, after spending the campaign trying to stop us, later tried to claim the reform as its own.

If the tickets were corrupt when they locked out a double-digit party, they were not suddenly virtuous while the left ran them. If abolition is good policy now, it was good policy before we made the cost of keeping them obvious. Victorians deserve fairer elections: votes that travel where voters send them, not where a preference dealer sells them in private.

Watch my interview with Sheila Gunn Reid for the full story. Share this article. If you want to help cover the cost of this win, go to SaveVictoria.com.

Contributions made through SaveVictoria.com are not donations to the Free Palestine Party. They help cover the legal and administrative costs incurred in establishing and registering the party.