Sure. Thank you very much.
When we talk about a weak government, we need to be careful, so let me nuance that particular claim.
PR typically leads to avoiding a majority parliament. In other words, if there is a party that wins a majority of the votes, PR will reflect that, but that's rare. What normally tends to happen is that you have an undominated legislature, which is a legislature with no single political party having a majority. Then you need to either form a coalition government or have minority governments.
Whether a coalition government is going to be weaker than a single party majority government is a function of many variables. Two or three political parties that are cohesive and that are ideologically close to each other on various policy dimensions may be no less strong and no weaker than a similarly united, strong, single party majority government. Whether a coalition government is weaker or not is a matter of how ideologically aligned the coalition parties are.
What I do want to stress, though, is that the preponderance of such coalition situations is far greater with proportional representation than with the plurality or majoritarian system. It's not that there are no exceptions, because there are.
With respect to the single transferable vote, there is a reason it has been popular as a proportional choice in the Anglo-Saxon electorate and political world. It's largely because it preserves local representation, and largely because the identification of the voter with the candidates continues. That remains, but it gives you choice. In contrast to the alternative vote, it does become proportional because each district has multiple seats assigned to it, so you are able to allocate and offer proportional rewards among the candidates of the various parties in reflecting the number of votes they have received.
The transferring of the votes when you start calculating the votes of candidates who didn't qualify and who are not meeting the electoral quota—which is a term that's used in order to determine whether a candidate is entitled to those seats—becomes complicated, but that's a question for administration. Our colleagues in Australia know more about it than anybody else. You can get around that. Australia offers instructive lessons in that regard by giving the opportunity for voters to essentially entrust their choice to a political party.