last week, she said that after the House of Assembly had agreed to the principle of single seat constituencies and a reduced number of seats on the House of Assembly, the whole matter would be referred to the Boundaries Commission.

What is not clear is just what the Commission, which is made up of two Government representatives, two Opposition representatives, a judicial representative and an independent chairman, will then do.

Will it draw a number of different sets of boundaries based on different size constituencies from which the House of Assembly would then choose the ideal number? Or will it make a recommendation based on a single number of seats which the House can then accept or reject? Common sense would suggest that it would be better if the decision on the ideal constituency size, or the ideal number of seats, was made beforehand, either through a debate in the House, a Constitutional conference or a referendum and the Boundaries Commission could then draw the boundaries based on that recommendation.

Instead, Premier Smith had said the Boundaries Commission has the superior knowledge and expertise -- which the House as a whole apparently lacks -- to make these decisions.

That might be true, assuming the same people who have sat on past Boundaries Commissions were to sit on this one. But only one of the Parliamentarians who sat on the last Commission is still in the House: Finance Minister Eugene Cox.

Two other members, former Premier David Saul and former Deputy Leader of the PLP Walter Roberts are out of politics, while the UBP's Maxwell Burgess is now in the Senate and therefore technically able to sit. As for the Independent members, chairman Sir Frank Blackman is presumably still available and judicial member Sir Clifford Hammett, the former Chief Justice of Fiji might be. The Commission secretary, Gladstone (Tab) Bassett, died in 1997.

Only the naive would believe that the political members are going to go into the Commission meetings without a specific number in mind.

So why not make the decision beforehand? Instead, what Premier Smith is saying -- although she would presumably not word it like this -- is: "Give us a blank cheque to decide how many MPs you should have representing you. We are not going to tell you how many we want, only that it will be between 20 and 39. Trust us.'' Even if one accepts the PLP has a mandate for electoral change, it does not have a mandate for no consultation.