Apart from New Zealand where the recent transition to MMP has raised public and media interest in electoral systems and their impact on the culture and effectiveness of government, the electoral systems were simply not in dispute. The Additional Member System has become a well established and fully accepted feature of the German democratic process. There is no serious pressure for the change from the public or politicians. Equally in Australia, the electoral systems, AV for the House of Representatives and STV for the Senate, on the whole work well and are widely supported. Similarly in Ireland STV has been operation since the 1920s and is still widely popular with the public if less certainly with the majority of politicians.
Considerable caution is needed when reading across international experience.
The fact that certain countries share democratic principles, ancestry, language or culture is not sufficient to guarantee that a system will operate in the same way in each of them. The second was the importance of building in a review process not only to monitor the impact of any new system, but to have on-going responsibility for oversight of elections and electoral matters generally. These functions are carried out by independent electoral commissions in Australia and New Zealand. Access to Submissions received by the Commission 16. The Commission wishes the evidence it has received in the course of its work to be available for scrutiny.