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The Conservatives have certainly learned that all you have to do is have a referendum and change will defeat itself. They want to keep our present system, in which just getting a plurality of votes in each riding permits you to keep power with 39 per cent of the vote. That is why the Conservatives do not bother arguing about what electoral system they prefer: they just want a referendum to stop change. That should teach us about the dangers of referendums. Besides, the last election was a sort of referendum on Conservative ideas about elections.

The second lesson was that very little time, effort or information was expended on informing the public about the electoral system options. We should have known better. Electoral systems are the bottom preference on the public opinion totem pole. They are “political,” which most people don’t like. They are institutions, which bore people silly. The recent Price Edward Island referendum, which gave a 52-per-cent majority to MMPR, is the proof of the pudding. Only 36 per cent of the population bothered to turn out to vote. Finally, electoral systems also deal with concepts most people find mysterious, to say the least. The lesson is that any change in electoral systems will require a lot of explaining and information – a lot.

The third lesson is that there was never any political leadership. Never once did a leading political party put its credibility on the line to give solid and continuous leadership by all its political élites to tell the people what they were doing and why. Yet, we knew this was how things got changed in New Zealand, the only recent case of switching from first-past-the-post to proportional representation.