Electoral Reform committee  It is an alloyed bad when the support is so low, but it's not an unalloyed bad.

Electoral Reform committee  My view is that if you're really serious, you would try to get the rules of the situation changed. I don't see how you could break out of the current situation short of a serious breakdown of the representative process at the next election.

Electoral Reform committee  I think the insistence on some form of answer before the end of this Parliament is the best guarantee that nothing will happen.

Electoral Reform committee  I've basically given you my answer.

Electoral Reform committee  I have a more complicated answer. I think the legitimacy of the result requires some sort of dialogue, as it were, between this committee and something else. It doesn't have to be the whole electorate in referendum. As I said in my opening remarks, I don't think the populatio

Electoral Reform committee  You stated it as a general proposition, so it's hard to disagree. I guess I could also note that on a very concrete promise it would seem that the electors were perfectly willing to let the government take as long as necessary to meet its Syrian refugee total, for example. There

Electoral Reform committee  —in the time that we're talking about.

Electoral Reform committee  It's also true, by the way, for ethnic minorities. The Senate looks much more like Australia than the House does. The House is full of people named “Jeff”, as far as I can tell.

Electoral Reform committee  Well, no, the Sheilas are in the Senate. The fact that the Australian parties have engineered STV so completely, and have the “above the line” box, which is pretty much the determining factor in the flow of the vote, means that in effect—notwithstanding what Gordon said—they've

Electoral Reform committee  I think the repeated occurrence of that is a perverse result. On one hand, parties and voters themselves have conspired to reverse the perversity, so to speak. If you take the historical view, those things have not tended to persist indefinitely, but there's no question that it

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. There are broad tendencies that we can draw from the literature, but it's very difficult to take those broad tendencies and place them on a concrete result for the particular package that a particular country represents. With your indulgence, can I just say one thing?

Electoral Reform committee  The nature of political party organization is hugely important here. The majoritarian operation in Australia is vulnerable to backbench spills all the time. If you go to the old Parliament building in Canberra and look at the total number of Prime Ministers of Australia, it's eno

Electoral Reform committee  That is what I said. It obviously depends on how big the list component is relative to the single-member component. But I would think that one of the appeals of MMP in this country—it might have been part of the appeal in New Zealand, although I think they're thinking more of the

Electoral Reform committee  That's the Australian system. Is it something different from that?

Electoral Reform committee  You have to understand that the animating spirit of any majoritarian system is essentially like that of the existing system. It just does it better and with fewer anomalies and, in particular, is less likely to produce what an academic would call “social choice perversities”. It'