One of the differences between the Australian system and the proposed UK system is they have compulsory voting and compulsory ranking of all candidates, neither of which would be in play in the UK.
This has lead to ‘above the line’ voting, where parties register what they want their supporters to put as their preferences, and then you can just mark a box for that party and you get assigned that party’s registered preferences. This gets rid of many of the advantages of AV (though not all, as people are free to express whatever preferences they want—it’s just that 95% of them don’t) in favour of backroom deals between parties for preference swaps.
One of the differences between the Australian system and the proposed UK system is they have compulsory voting and compulsory ranking of all candidates, neither of which would be in play in the UK. This has lead to ‘above the line’ voting, where parties register what they want their supporters to put as their preferences, and then you can just mark a box for that party and you get assigned that party’s registered preferences. This gets rid of many of the advantages of AV (though not all, as people are free to express whatever preferences they want—it’s just that 95% of them don’t) in favour of backroom deals between parties for preference swaps.