I've never understood the advantage of preferential systems per se. It seems to me that we know the disadvantages, which are that these systems make it difficult for parties that are not within the mainstream—even harder than it is under our system—to get elected, so you have less diversity. Where it's been brought in, it's usually been done pretty much to either keep out so-called extremists or to allow two parties who are close together, but can't agree, to keep out a third party, let's say. In the case of Australia, you had the National Party and the Liberal Party getting together to keep out Labor. In other words, the actual principled advantage of a preferential ballot to my mind.... I mean, you can say in theory that the local candidate who is elected is less disliked than he or she might be under our system, where you could have 40% in favour and 60% despising that person. But that's really unusual, and certainly it doesn't seem to me that you'd want to build your electoral system based on that kind of idea. To me, it's essentially a red herring that has been brought in, and I'm not quite sure why. If we had extremist parties that were threatening to become very significant and undermine.... When I say “extremist”, I mean parties that don't believe in democracy.
On July 27th, 2016. See this statement in context.