WHILE most Victorians, I suspect, do not share my psephological enthusiasms, the forthcoming state election offers considerable interest.

A first-term government, unexpectedly thrust into office, albeit with the narrowest of majorities and with a different leader then at the helm, is in peril of being cast out again. 

In determining the result, the Assembly seats of central Victoria will be crucial: Bendigo East and West, Ripon, Macedon and the two renamed Ballarat-centred seats, all held by Labor, became highly marginal at the previous election. 

The tight electoral contests in these seats in central Victoria have understandably begun to attract media attention.

When Bendigo voters go the polls in two weeks, many will have at least acquired an awareness of the main candidates in the Bendigo seats, who have been actively courting them in the media and even in the flesh for some time now. 

However, there is a second electoral contest to be decided on November 29 which has largely slipped under the radar of the general public. 

This is the contest for the "upper house", the Legislative Council, where the major parties and a host of minor parties and independents are vying for the 40 seats it holds. 

Bendigo electors will be required to cast a ballot for their preferred candidates in the Northern Victoria Region, which covers about one-third of the land mass of the state, extending from the Mallee across to the north-east of the state, and down through Bendigo to the towns which have become dormitory suburbs of the metropolis, such as Sunbury, Gisborne, Macedon, Kilmore and Healesville.

Each of the eight Legislative Council Regions encompasses eleven Assembly electorates. 

The sheer scale of the Regions reflects a compromise between retaining some semblance of geographic representation and providing for a proportional representation (PR) electoral system. 

South Australia and NSW, in designing their PR-elected upper houses, did away with local representation altogether, constituting the entire state as a single multi-member electorate.

The outcome in the Legislative Council election will not determine who wins office, but will affect how the government governs. Unlike the very uncertain outcomes anticipated in the Assembly seats in central Victoria, the results in the Northern Victoria electorate seem clear: two Liberal, one National and two Labor.

In contrast to the parlous majority which the Coalition has held in the Legislative Assembly, it has enjoyed a comfortable majority in the Council, which goes some way to explaining why the upper house has attracted minimal attention in recent years. 

When the Bracks government reformed the Legislative Council prior to the 2006 election it expected that, thereafter, neither government nor opposition would command a majority in it, enabling the chamber to function more effectively as an ‘house of review’. 

Its expectations were immediately borne out, with Labor’s Council majority being substituted at the 2006 election by a chamber in which minor parties (Greens and DLP) held the ‘balance of power’. 

The 2010 state election delivered 21 Council seats to the Coalition, including three of the five seats in the Northern Victoria Region, with the remaining two being secured by the ALP, and a similar distribution applied in the other two predominantly non-metropolitan regions (Western and Eastern Victoria).

The successful Northern Victoria candidates in 2010 were (in order of election): Wendy Lovell (Liberal), Candy Broad (ALP), Damian Drum (National), Kaye Darveniza (ALP) and Donna Petrovich (Liberal). Broad and Petrovich vacated their seats prior to the 2014 election (the latter to contest Macedon in the Assembly) and the resultant casual vacancies were filled by replacements nominated by their parties. 

The ALP enters the 2014 election in Northern Victoria with no sitting members recontesting, so it has a slate of candidates who lack any sort of public political profile. 

This will not prevent it from regaining the two seats, as voting tends to follow party lines, with the Council vote generally "piggy-backing" on the related Assembly candidates and their distribution of party ‘how-to-vote’ tickets. However, the demography of the Region means that Labor has no hope of gaining more seats.

With the exception of urban Bendigo and the quasi-metropolitan towns on the southern fringe, the Northern Victoria electorate is prime Coalition territory. 

Labor’s 2010 support here was the lowest it received in all eight Council Regions, and this was also the case for the Greens vote.

The Coalition has two sitting members in Northern Victoria with relatively high profiles for Legislative Councillors – Damian Drum and Wendy Lovell. 

This is partly due to them being ministers in the Napthine government, partly due to them having represented the more localised Provinces which predated the Regions, and, in Drum’s case, also relates to his former involvement at elite level in a sport which commands enthusiastic interest in Victoria. 

Given the nature of the Legislative Council electoral system, Lovell, Drum and Amanda Millar (who replaced Petrovich a year ago) have no real need to actively campaign for their re-election.

Even a swing against the Coalition parties in the Northern Region would not threaten their return to the red leather benches of the Legislative Council.

Dr Ardel Shamsullah is a political commentator.