Thank you for having me speak. It's nice to look everyone in the face to see the diversity—or lack thereof—in the committee.
I only have two minutes, so I'm going to make a few points very quickly. The first is to address my opinion on making a referendum. There's a resource that was presented to me, prvote.com, that you can take a look at. It shows how the difference in wording of referendum questions can make an enormous distortion of the results. That is what terrifies me about a referendum as an appropriate way to address this issue.
My second point is that you have a mandate as a committee, and there are specific principles that you're supposed to be looking for in a system to suggest to Parliament. One of the principles is effectiveness and legitimacy, and I know you've probably read it a million times, but it does say to reduce distortion, which is why I'm very confused that the alternative vote is still on the table.
Even in your example that is in the handout, it is one possible outcome of how AV can look, but in many cases—and I'm sure that in your study of that system you can look at the ways—it can distort results worse than first past the post can. Therefore, I don't believe it should be in the running, and my fear is that, because it is preferred by the Prime Minister, who has endorsed it in the past, it might still be on the table for political reasons.
Another point is that the other principle of accessibility and inclusiveness might be used as a reason to promote alternative vote, using it as an accessibility issue. We did hear from one other person that it was too complex to talk about a proportional system, but my argument is that the least complex system is dictatorship, so we have to look at complexity, we have to look at—