Electoral Reform committee  I think referenda are blunt instruments for making complex policy decisions. I think they are useful for giving Parliament a sense of where people are on a thing. In other words, it's hard for me to imagine what a referendum.... Obviously one can't put a referendum to a large gro

Electoral Reform committee  No, I think that covers it.

Electoral Reform committee  I think you're correct in suggesting that people vote for all kinds of reasons. Again, when I look at, for example, the European Union referendum in Britain, we don't propose to the public the exact process. It is, “Do you want in or do you want out?”, and we leave Parliament to

Electoral Reform committee  I'm talking about over the course of a hundred or two hundred years; it's a relatively new phenomenon.

Electoral Reform committee  That's an entirely different problem, because we're talking about something entirely different, which is the dissolution of the confederation or a partial dissolution of the confederation.