The one redeeming feature of the state business lobby's foray into electoral reform on the weekend was that it was honest about what it wants to achieve.
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Premier Jeremy Rockliff has committed to restoring Tasmania's House of Assembly to 35 members at the next election.
As the word "restoring" implies, it's a case of going back to the way things were. That is, before the 1998 election when the House was cut to 25 members in a bid to keep the Greens from winning the balance of power.
It would be reasonable to expect that the change will be as straight-forward as electing seven members rather than five from each of our five lower house electorates, which, conveniently, are the same for the federal House of Representatives.
Yet the Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has decided it doesn't like that idea, and it wants the government to lead a wider conversation about what an expanded parliament should look like.
Its idea is that we should dump the five electorates and go to seven.
TCCI chief executive Michael Bailey argued "this model would increase representation and ensure that regional communities can have their voices heard", but he wasn't walking away from the true motivation either.
"Importantly, we believe this model will ensure we can continue to have stable government," his statement read.
That's code for majority government, which, like the cuts in the 1990s, means the aim is to minimise the chances of a minority government that relies on the support of, most likely, the Greens.
The merits of majority versus minority governments notwithstanding, Tasmanian politics has moved beyond this attempt to stack the deck one way or another.
There's a realisation that the cuts that gave us fewer members have not delivered for our democracy; quite the opposite.
It's highly questionable if the TCCI's proposal would make majority government a more likely outcome, while it's all but certain that scrapping the existing electorates would cause unnecessary confusion for voters.
We should learn from the experience of the smaller parliament and not entertain daft ideas aimed at gaming the system to advantage the major parties.
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