Or which micro-party will they infiltrate?
Speaking of micro-parties, I was looking at the 1999 NSW state election where some nutter registered about twenty parties and worked the preferences in a very clever way to get his mate from one of those Outdoor Recreation "let's shit on national parks" parties elected. Some of the micro-parties there are just absolutely hilarious. I don't know if these were all his, but there were parties such as Jobs For Everyone, the Four Wheel Drive Party, Against Promotion of Homosexuality, Three Day Weekend Party, People Against Paedophiles, and my personal favourite Make Billionaires Pay More Tax! (The exclamation mark being part of their name.) The bulk of the micro-parties outpolled the CEC too, haha. Voting below the line must've been exhausting at that election.
Oh Cobbler Cobbler Cobbler!
Voting – The Senate - Australian Electoral Commission
Basically, if you vote above the line, you simply put 1 in the box of your preferred party. You are allocated preferences according to whatever Group Voting Ticket (or preference flow) the party has registered with the AEC for your state. If the party registers multiple GVTs, they are allocated evenly; i.e. if they register two GVTs, half their votes receive one of them and the other half receive the second.
If you vote below the line, then it's like how you vote for the House of Representatives: you number every single box. At normal elections, that tends to mean numbering about 40-60 candidates representing about 15-25 groups. These numbers vary by state; NSW always has the largest Senate ballot closely followed by Victoria; those in most other states and especially the territories tend to be more modest. This year the Senate ballots everywhere are at record lengths. The Victorian Senate ballot will run to 97 individual candidates standing for 40 separate groups (it's the second-largest federal Senate ballot ever, exceeded only by this year's NSW Senate ballot - 110 candidates in 45 groups).
So if you're a political junkie like me, you're going to take forever at the polling station while you number the Senate 1-97; I am, of course, preparing my vote beforehand to just copy out onto the official ballot paper in the booth. If you're not that keen, you owe it to yourself to at least check your favoured party's Group Voting Ticket to make sure that when you vote above the line, you are given preferences that accord with your interests and intent. Victorians who couldn't be bothered checking what they were voting for when they voted above the line were the fools that elected a Family First Senator in 2004 off the back of ALP and Democrat preferences. Now I'm worried that NSW voters who can't be arsed checking GVTs will vote for the Sex Party, not knowing that their preferences go to Pauline Hanson and One Nation ahead of the three major parties - and Pauline may well be in contention for the final NSW Senate place. We don't need that woman making a political comeback.