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Victorian Animal Justice party MP Georgie Purcell says abolishing the state’s group voting ticket system without any other changes would see the balance of power handed to One Nation.

The Age reported yesterday that the Allan government is planning to introduce legislation, when parliament returns from the winter break, to reform the state’s unusual voting system.

In Victoria, micro-parties have long been able to use complex preference deals to get elected even if they only have a tiny share of votes.

The Greens, Labor, the Coalition and One Nation are expected to likely benefit at the expense of crossbench MPs as a result of the changes.

double quotation mark Crossbench MPs like myself support electoral reform, and we’ve been asking for it to be implemented in a sensible way for years. We want change too.

But we don’t want a model that disproportionately benefits certain minor parties.

Factional heads of the Labor Party with the simplistic belief that abolishing the GVT will retain their MPs that are second on the ticket clearly do not understand the system.

Purcell said Victoria should look at a “proportional statewide model” similar to those in New South Wales and Western Australia, which she said would stop “undemocratic outcomes” without being a “death knell for minor parties”.

A crossbench source told the Guardian on Sunday they had been expecting the government to try to overhaul the group voting system around this time, to get the changes in place before this year’s election.

But they said the crossbench had not been consulted on the changes generally, nor on any specific details of the legislation Labor reportedly to introduce.

Guardian Australia has contacted the office of the premier, Jacinta Allan , for comment.