How will you increase gameside activity as PM?

It's not strictly my purview to increase gameside activity, but obviously I strive to have the ministries be present on gameside as is reasonable.

And, will you try to become more active on gameside and the RMB yourself?

I think I have been tbh...

I'm not fond of the RMB but I've been keeping on top of the RMB during my PM tenure as I feel it's important to be present there as liaison to the Cabinet as well.

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Do you have any particular concerns about the fact that you're running for a third consecutive term?

Marius Rahl

Fortitudine Vincimus!

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Do you have any particular concerns about the fact that you're running for a third consecutive term?

Not really. I still think I'm the right man for the job, and I don't think I've become stagnant.

Still, though, unless there aren't any even remotely viable candidates running in June, this will be my last consecutive term. That means I will have served as Prime Minister for a full year, a good time for somebody else to take the reigns. Personally, I'm vying for a PM that is a bit more RA-affine than me to take over in 4 months.

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Both your campaign and Farengeto's have a strong focus on improving cabinet communication and transparency, both internally and externally, and rightly so. There were a number of occasions during the last term where I was unaware of important decisions being made in other ministries, at least one of which I was the *only* cabinet member not to know about and in a couple of cases I only found out about them at the same time as the Assembly/rest of the region. How would you go about ensuring this doesn't happen in the future?

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Yahweo usenneo ir varleo, ihraneo jurlaweo hraseu seu, ir jiweveo arladi.

Salma 145:8

translate

The LORD is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.
Psalm 145: 8

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Both your campaign and Farengeto's have a strong focus on improving cabinet communication and transparency, both internally and externally, and rightly so. There were a number of occasions during the last term where I was unaware of important decisions being made in other ministries, at least one of which I was the *only* cabinet member not to know about and in a couple of cases I only found out about them at the same time as the Assembly/rest of the region. How would you go about ensuring this doesn't happen in the future?

This is an excellent question.

Now, the classical approach here would be for me to sit in my ivory tower, firing volleys of "transparency" and "accountability", while my opponent in response similarly sits in his ivory tower doing the same, and we both try to hit the perfect word-count for the keywords that the electorate likes most. I'm not going to do that. Instead, let me demonstrate how my thought process on this was (past tense) and what I am already doing (present tense) to fix it.

First, we need to identify the root cause, which in this case is simple. Your feeling of being left out came from FA decisions. Escade, Tim, and myself are all on the FA team. Therefore, there were cases where we already inadvertently had some of the discussion that would have swapped into the Cabinet proper if this were not the case, and we didn't follow the proper procedure. Particularly with the January Accords, what happened is that Tim just simply forgot that formal Cabinet approval is needed and submitted it to the Assembly before we did that. I reminded him about that and he immediately and apologetically reached out to you about it, but the damage was done.

Second, is this a one-off problem or something that can happen again? That Tim simply forgot about the Cabinet approval requirement is something that he, or anyone from the FA team, will forget again, plus I'll be likely mentioning it whenever it comes up again. So this particular situation can be considered a one-off. The principle of the matter, however, is systemic. Having three of four ministers in the same team producing work that requires Cabinet sign-off - it should be intuitively clear that this can easily happen again, despite best intentions. We are lazy by nature. So we can't just stop the process here, and have to keep going.

Third, what are the possible strategies to work against this? The obvious one is to not allow Ministers other than the MoFA to be in the FA team. This may hurt more than it helps, though, as all three of us are on the FA team for a reason. Tim is the MoFA, so obviously he must be on there. Escade is the FA team's cultural expert, so she should be on there. As for myself, I am there both ex officio to observe, but also as a regular Legislator, invited into the Team by Escade and explicitly kept by Tim because they want my input on things. A restriction on the FA team would hurt it more than it helps the Cabinet.

But more generally, let's recognize that this is a problem that can occur not just with the FA team, but also with the RA's Advisory Council or SPSF's General Corps. While FA and RA have minister-appointed teams, in SPSF the situation is even more complicated by virtue of the General Corps being Assembly-approved. So, the approach to limit minister involvement in other ministries in this way is too hairy and therefore a non-starter.

Therefore, we need another solution. I'm generally a big fan of eschewing huge decrees to force processes in favor of subtly nudging set pieces into place such that the change happens organically. With regards to Tim simply forgetting the requirement, Nakari is currently working on a law index sorted by topic, so that each Minister can quickly review the relevant laws that applies to them. That will help work against that problem.

To solve the systemic issue, we can consider what would force such an "inadvertent 3/4 Cabinet" to involve the full Cabinet as needed. This actually ties in with another open problem, which is that our documentation requirements are quite limited and incomplete. What we can do is force us to document what we are doing better, not just in the Cabinet proper but also in the ministries (which is fully lacking at this time). By just having documented things, the missing Cabinet minister will get a concise but complete briefing of the matter at hand automatically.

And so, I have written a draft for a new version of the Sunshine Act that introduces these documentation requirements. It's currently under review for my fellow comrades in the SPP, but you have seen it before - it contains an entire article with three substantive sections about documentation requirements, and I hope we can bring it to the assembly for discussion soon.

This is very likely not the answer you expected, but I hope it satisfies much better than the usual ivory tower approach would have. Thank you again for that wonderful question.

EDIT: Whew, the answer to this question is longer than the campaign itself!

(This post was last modified: 02-07-2018, 06:52 AM by Roavin.)

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Do you believe there is a danger that appointed "advisory councils", which were originally envisioned to be councils of elders, rather than policy drivers, might be replacing the elected Cabinet as the main executive decision making bodies in the region?


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Former Delegate of the South Pacific
Posts outside High Court venues should be taken as those of any other legislator.
I do not participate in the regional server, but I am happy to talk through instant messaging or on the forum.

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Do you envision there ever being a need to have a Deputy PM?

Semi-Unretired

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Do you believe there is a danger that appointed "advisory councils", which were originally envisioned to be councils of elders, rather than policy drivers, might be replacing the elected Cabinet as the main executive decision making bodies in the region?

Yes and no.

If we're going to refer to the Advisory Council, the FA Team, and the General Corps by a single name, "advisory council" is not a fitting name. So let's just say that all of these are the board of the respective ministry.

Each ministry has its own board with its own operating paradigm. These are each quite different from another, but that isn't a bad thing. The boards are established in a way that works best for that particular ministry, and what is important is that the general hierarchy (with the Cabinet at the top giving the general direction and the boards/ministries implementing that) is upheld. This has been generally true. To answer your question, however, we need to look at each board.

In RA, the Advisory Council has been, and continues to be, a council of elders as you say, advising the minister in the running of the ministry. They're not setting executive policy, and I see no danger there.

In the military, the situation is somewhat different. The Generals are supposed to be the elite gameplayers actually running the SPSF. The minister serves rather as oversight and Cabinet liaison for the generals, whilst also assisting them in civilian matters (in practice the MoMA has generally been a SPSF member as well so far, but that's not strictly required). So yes, for the military, the board actually is more of a policy driver, though this is by design and it should be noted that the direction that the Cabinet needs to give the military is minimal; in most cases, the directive is basically "make sure we have good troops", though obviously on the occasion when we have some foreign policy objective to fulfill elsewhere, the GC is directed by the Cabinet accordingly. I see no danger here either.

Now, the Foreign Affairs ministry is the potentially dangerous one. The FA Team was established under Escade initially as a sort of advisory council like in RA, but quickly and organically developed to be more as a proactive team that is appointed and overseen by the minister and operates mostly on a consensus-based model. The potential danger comes when the general foreign policy direction is not set by the elected Cabinet as a whole and implemented by the FA team, but rather dictated by the appointed FA team. This can be exasperated by a situation like we have now, where 3/4 of the Cabinet are on that FA team. While I wouldn't say this has happened yet, it has come close.

To see how I'm working against this — see my answer to Seraph's question (presumably that question and its answer triggered this question anyway).

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How do you feel these instances of ministers being "out of the loop" have affected trust and comfort within the Cabinet?


Inviato dal mio iPhone utilizzando Tapatalk

Former Delegate of the South Pacific
Posts outside High Court venues should be taken as those of any other legislator.
I do not participate in the regional server, but I am happy to talk through instant messaging or on the forum.

Legal Resources:
THE MATT-DUCK Law Archive | Mavenu Diplomatic Archive | Rules of the High Court | Case Submission System | Online Rulings Consultation System

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Do you envision there ever being a need to have a Deputy PM?

That depends on how the Prime Minister runs the Cabinet. The way I do it, no — and this fits the post-GC trend of ministries not having deputies but rather having a team (the board, as I called it above), with the Minister (or in their absence the Prime Minister) liaisoning.

A Prime Minister that is not you or me could handle this differently, but in my subjective opinion, that's not the best way to utilize the soft power of the office.

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