I just want to thank everybody for being here. I very much appreciate this opportunity for people to talk and members of Parliament to listen to us.
This is just a little background about me. I was born and raised in Romania in the late 1970s, and that involved being born in a dictatorship. So I know what being raised and living in a dictatorship means; I know what living in an undemocratic country means. So when I see that political parties can gain full control of the country with 40% of the vote, that to me is undemocratic.
It's very simple for me. Just pick up the dictionary and look at the definition of “democracy”. It involves the will of the majority, right? You get the will of the majority and then you implement the issues that the majority agrees upon. That's one point.
On the point of a referendum, with so little information, with so little education—I spent the summer just talking to friends, talking to people on the street, acquaintances, about the electoral system, and I've had many people literally ask me what first past the post is. If you don't understand the system that we have now, how can you possibly vote on whether you want change or not? I don't want to blame anybody; it just seems there's some sort of failure in the educational system maybe or, I don't know, engagement with people, and so on.
A referendum doesn't work when people don't fully know what's going on in the country and what it might change to. Perhaps, like many other people have said, a referendum afterwards might actually be useful when everybody knows what's going on.
Other than that, I don't know how mandatory voting would be enforced. It could lead to spoiled ballots. That's, I guess, something the committee could look into. Engagement in general, I think, should be promoted a little bit more, because people are just not aware of what's going on, altogether, on the street and so on.