Matthew Wilcox

1) Proportionality needs to be maintained in situations where a party’s electoral seats are greater than its overall share of the vote – thus apportioning extra seats to other parties to rebalance the proportional vote, even at the cost of an overhang, would be an excellent step.
2) Parties winning electoral seats without making the threshold should have those seats, but to gain more seats should still be subject to the threshold – thus ACT in the 2008 election would have been entitled to their one electoral seat, but no more as they still failed to meet the threshold.
3) That being said, I agree with the Electoral commission that 4% is a more reasonable threshold overall and thus our current threshold should be revised downward.