Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming.
I'm going to try to be very quick because I have a lot of things I'd like to say. The first is that if there's a referendum, the referendum should say, “Should each vote be counted equally?” Currently, they do not.
I would ask you a question, and I'd ask you to answer it in your own minds, because obviously I can't have a conversation with each of you. Would you say that we live in a representative democracy? I do not think that we do. In a representative democracy, each person's vote would be represented equally. The issue of proportional representation is an issue of values. Do you value equality?
In the MMP system, that solves the main problem, but it results in another problem. In a national level, or whatever regional level you adopt, the outcome is proportional, but it does not represent my opinion of who best represents me. It represents which party I would support. In my opinion, the party system is the leading cause of voter disengagement. Proportional representation is not an optional part of representative democracy; it's the difference between representative and misrepresentative democracy.
On the issue of which electoral system to choose, if I cannot express my support for my most favoured candidate without it being wasted, then I cannot accurately be represented in Parliament. I can be misrepresented by someone's ideas, which I believe are maybe less awful than someone else's, but I'm not going to be accurately represented.
STV is the only system which is candidate-centred. That means it's the only system where the candidate is the focus, not the party. If you believe in regional representation, you're not really going to adopt a completely proportional system. If you believe in regional representation, the only system that preserves that and is proportional is going to be STV, single transferable vote. My vote will be such that I can express who I most prefer, but if there are not enough votes to elect that person, my next choice can be elected. Therefore, it can still be proportional. I can still represent who I actually believe is my best representative, but my vote still counts.
You have not talked enough about STV, in my opinion. Obviously, the main focus is proportional representation. That is obviously the biggest problem here. If you're going to be talking about what system you're going to use in proportional representation, the focus has to be on mixed-member systems versus STV, what the problem is with a party-focused system versus a candidate—