Thank you, Chair, and my thanks to our panel.
First, let me start by thanking all of you for your commitment to serve our country. What this boils down to is an effort to serve, to seek a way to benefit our citizens more broadly. My thanks to John for serving, to Diane for your time, and to Antony for all of your ideas, including your tragicomic remark that our nominations often favour the “male, pale, and stale”.
You suggested a polarity almost, Antony, between representation and exclusion. I think that's a helpful way to look at the experience of many voters. At every open mike night we have conducted so far, and in many of the thousands of responses we've received on the survey we've put up, people expressed that they try to participate, they vote, they do all the things they're supposed to, and then the results come back and they find that more than half of the votes cast elected nobody. Is that the core issue you're trying to fix?
Someone once said the opposite of love isn't hate, it's ambivalence. I sometimes worry it's not just that people are turned off our politics. They just become ambivalent towards it. Is that true or am I stretching it?