I don't know if I have 45 seconds, but here I go.
It's a very blunt instrument that leads to binary choices on very complicated matters when we haven't even figured out what the questions are yet in a governance ecosystem.
When I look around the room, I look at the age of this committee and at my own age. I am the generation, as you are the generation, of people who are the recipients of national referenda and referenda recovery in a world where our national referenda have tended to be extremely divisive, not leading to goodwill and greater understanding on the importance of the issue. This is why it's so important that all of you, as parliamentarians, take this role seriously in what you're going to be doing. There's nothing more important.
I have to say that for our whole governance ecosystem, as a former public servant—that's how I spent 30 years of my life—we have spent an entire time reflecting on the outcome of those referenda. However, here's the good news: we have evolved our models of government. In 1981, when I started working in the Department of Finance, it was a very different model of government than it is today. We have made it a far more decentralized system in every aspect of what we do.