This was considered to be an area of huge interest when the system first started, because people were obviously used to having single-member constituency MPs only and then, suddenly, all these list MPs arrived and there was, I think in the early days, quite a strong feeling of class A and class B that did exist. And as Katie cited, in Scotland there was a similar thing at the beginning.
What I would observe is that, as time went on, voters and citizens tended to judge the politicians by performance, by achievements, rather than by what type of MP they were. Of course, not everyone does that. There are always some who will want to make the distinction.
I guess the constituency MPs continue to do the work that they've always done, and that you're all very familiar with here. List MPs fall broadly into two areas. One type are people who, in all honesty, probably want to be constituency MPs, and so their parties might assign them to a certain area to work in and they'll run services and be invited to things, and so on and so forth, in a way that gives representation of their party to voters in that particular constituency, remembering that the same voter has two votes under that in that New Zealand context.
The more interesting area, I think, about list MPs is that it enables a richer diversity of people to come to Parliament, people who represent communities that might be significant across the whole country but very, very small in status in a particular geographical mapped-off area of a constituency. That's enabled the Parliament, in what is called the House of Representatives, to look much more like a house of representatives because of that.
Also within that category are people who are policy specialists in certain areas, people who are experts at something, for whom the parties say, “Look, we really need somebody with these sorts of skills”. They might not be somebody who'd be elected at a geographic level or somebody whose great strength is in running surgeries for constituents in need, but they are people who have a lot to offer to public policy from a certain area. I think in that context, being able to get people from both walks of life was very useful.