And you're getting better all the time.
I was actually in Australia in 1999. I'm not sure I agree with you on the comment about mandatory voting being the decisive factor, unless the assumption is that you would have had voter participation that was perhaps half of what it was actually. Every state in Australia rejected the constitutional option except the Australian capital territory. Anyway, that's completely irrelevant to what I was going to ask you, and I just wanted to put that in for no particular reason.
What I did want to ask you about is this. When you hold a referendum at the same time as an election, there are times when I can see it being an effective thing to do. In Australia, for example, the referendums are always on whether some amendment should be made to the constitution. The referendum is the final step. So the amendment occurs, assuming you get a positive vote, automatically, regardless of what happens to government.
But there is another example of a referendum in Australia that was held at the same time as an election where the election effectively obviated the result of the referendum, and there have been examples in Canada as well. I'm thinking of the case in Australia when western Australia voted in either 1934 or 1935 to secede from Australia, but the government that had proposed the motion was defeated at the same time as the referendum was adopted. Even though it had a two-thirds vote in favour of secession from Australia, the consequence was that the new Labor government followed through without much enthusiasm and basically ensured the defeat of that proposal.
Similarly, in the early 1980s the Conservative government in Saskatchewan put forward a referendum or a plebiscite on public funding for abortions, I believe. The public voted against public funding but elected a New Democratic government, which then set aside the results.
I see that kind of problem, and I'm not sure I see how to overcome that in our environment, where it actually is very difficult to have a genuinely binding referendum wherein the referendum itself is the final step, and the law simply takes over and starts operating as a result of the vote. Am I correct in my surmise in that regard?