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Originally Posted by GP_Matt
I don't know if she has responded and don't want to read ahead three pages to find out. But PR was discussed at one of the WRA conventions and it was brought up that it should be a referendum issue and not a campaign issue.
I tend to agree with that. PR is complicated and an important enough issue that it should stand alone. If a party promised PR and lost people would question if they lost for that reason or because of their 30 other policies. It is all well and good to decide that it is a better system, but it will fundamentally change both the way we elect our leaders and the way that seats are distributed in the legislature. I think it would be a bad plan to have a government push this on us without a full debate followed by a referendum.
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Fair enough--but in that case, it's up to the government to put it to a referendum.
The "citizen's initiative" idea was first proposed as showing the grassroots credentials of the party. Then, later, when we all pointed out that this could mean initiatives on all sorts of nonsense, we were reassured that it was so difficult to get the requisite number of signatures that we needn't worry--we won't have to worry about any actual citizen's initiatives--the policy has a built-in obstacle that is designed to be very difficult to overcome.
That means two things: first, that obstacle is going to operate equally to prevent sensible
and crazy "citizen's initiatives," and as a result we can't rely on it to bring about electoral reform. Second, it's clear that the whole idea amounts to lip service: Wild Rose doesn't actually want a whole bunch of citizen's initiatives--what they want is to be able to bolster their populist image, hoping that none of it will ever come to fruition because voters tend not to read the fine print.