Maiden Speech

Made my maiden speech in Full Council today.
Wasn't intending to, but then realised that I could make a contribution to the members motion on Elections and Postal Voting. Tied in my experiences from International Election monitoring in Ukraine, and how elections are run in developing democracies, compared to how they operate in old democracies.
In the UK we seem to be going backwards in terms of absentee voting. In most new democracies absentee voting is the source of most fraud, so they rarely allow it, except under highly controlled circumstances.
Speech went down well, and got some polite applause. Didn't pre-empt it either by saying "this is my maiden speech, go easy on me..."