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South Pacific Independent News Network · 10-11-2021, 10:16 PM

OCT. 2021 CABINET ELECTION
Prime Minister

Senior Editor James Halpert sat down with all candidates for Prime Minister to know more about them, their journey in the South Pacific and their ideas for the Cabinet.

HumanSanity

We’re back with the fifth discussion in our coverage of the October 2021 Cabinet Election! Thank you to HumanSanity for agreeing to this conversation.

Thanks for hosting, SPINN.

I was taking a look at your campaign and noticed that you have been around in NationStates for a long time. A bit more than 10 years, by the looks of it?

Yep
I believe I joined NationStates in February 2010

You spent time in 10000 Islands and in the Renegade Islands Alliance, but earlier this year you came to TSP. What drew you here?

TSP's democratic openness and defender stance
Both XKI and RIA were authoritarian-leaning systems, and those worked for me at times and didn't at others. The specific experiences that led me to leave XKI made me think that trying a region with robust democratic institutions would be both very different and refreshing relative to the experiences I had in the past

Did we live up to that expectation?

Oh yes. Having a super open Assembly and lots of legalistic debates is very different than what I had experienced in the past, but so far I'm enjoying getting to engage in those parts of the game that previously I had only dabbled in

You’ve quickly established yourself as a leader, having served the past term as Minister of Defence. What made you decide to go for Prime Minister this time around?

I had originally intended to not appear on the ballot this election cycle, I had some interest in being OWL Director and wanted to approach the PM about it after the election. However, there weren't a lot of people stepping forward to be Prime Minister, and I certainly could imagine myself doing well and thriving in the role. Working with people one-on-one to accomplish goals is a lot of what I do in NS, and that's the kind of relationship I want to foster with each Cabinet minister to help them achieve their goals in their portfolios and in guiding the Cabinet as a collective
Plus, I consider reforming OWL to be the top policy priority of the upcoming term, and being Prime Minister will still give me a direct opportunity to shape and manage that process

Let’s talk about that. Recently OWL has been missing out on giving recommendations, which in turn impacts the region’s ability to influence the course of WA votes. Why is this happening?

Proximately, OWL is not issuing recommendations because votes aren't being appropriately monitored by OWL Staff and therefore aren't being opened, closed, and recommendations issued.
Structurally, OWL has too much procedural and bureaucratic overhead in opening and closing each vote, which makes long-term staff engagement and productive back-and-forth discussion difficult. The process of opening and closing votes and issuing recommendations has to be changed in order to make OWL a sustainable program /end

I’m guessing the level of bureaucracy adds to a culture that promotes checking boxes as opposed to substantively discussing WA proposals for their own merit?

Absolutely, which is both counter production to votes happening in the first place and the votes spurring productive discussion that builds long-term WA literacy and engagement in TSP

Is there anything beyond simplifying the voting process that could or should be done to make OWL more active and efficient?

I'm open to simplifyng the recommendation-writing process as well, this way we can further reduce the amount of staff overhead on relatively thoughtless tasks. Then, OWL can be made more active by shifting the work efforts of OWL Staffers away from filling out forms and jumping through procedural hoops and towards OWL Staffers informally guiding back-and-forth discussions on WA proposals.
I'm open to talking about the details with the next OWL Director, and with potential OWL Directors who reach out to me or who I reach out to, but the big picture is that administrative overhead needs to go down to free up time for actual discussion, with tweaks along the way to make sure that big picture formula works.

Your campaign touches upon a number of issues, but I’d like to focus on internal management and accountability. You say that you want to have regular check ins with ministers to ensure that work is being done.

Yes

You also plan to issue regular updates to the Assembly.

Every 2 weeks is my hope
An "update to the Assembly" doesn't have to be a big thing. In my mind, it's 2-3 bullet points describing each Ministry's ongoing projects. My hope is it would be a 30 minute-1 hour work product

This is often promised, most often in the form of Cabinet Twitter posts, only to be forgotten as time goes by. Can you ensure that this policy of transparency would be followed throughout the term?

A distinction between this idea and Cabinet Twitter updates is that the Cabinet Twitter relies on each Minister (who has their own problems managing their Ministry) independently taking initiative to go grab the Cabinet Twitter form, fill it out, cross-post it, etc. This idea is different because it assigns the PM (me) responsibility for managing a project and coordinating with the Cabinet, which nets a higher chance of the process actually being managed to completion
As to "can I ensure it", I mean I can't ensure it but I've laid out a set of steps I intend to follow

Before wrapping things up I want to briefly discuss the issue of Frontiers/Strongholds. For the benefit of voters who might not be familiar, could you tell us what this is and how, if at all, you would respond to this as Prime Minister?

Frontiers/Strongholds - in short - will allow UCRs to choose to forego their executive founder in return for receiving a proportion of 50% of the incoming new nation pool. Each feeder's new nation pool will be cut in half
I have a couple of thoughts in my head about what this could mean for the South Pacific, and I intend to initiate internal Cabinet discussions about them so we can have a blueprint in place when this update drops. For us, it's obviously not a great thing to have a large decrease in our influx of new nations.
Some things I want to discuss with the Cabinet include:
- for the MoFA and MoD, how does this effect our defender stance and how will this impact our current treaty alliances and commitments? Do we need to ask the Assembly or High Court for clarification on any of these questions?
- for the MoE, how will we take advantage of a smaller pool of incoming nations to ensuring higher quality interactions with new nations since there is less breadth to cover?
- for the Cabinet as a whole, do we need our own "Frontier Region" to take advantage of this game update, and how should it be governed?
- if our spawn pool is decreased, is it acceptable for us to recruit as a UCR traditionally does and are we interested in that? How will we set ourselves up for it?
- any other concerns Cabinet-members have

I think it’s about time to wrap things up, but is there anything you would like to mention or discuss?

Not specifically! I hope to have the opportunity to serve as Prime Minister of the Coalition and hope that I will have your vote. If you have any questions, please ask in my campaign thread!

Thank you for participating! As always, please do check out HumanSanity's campaign campaign campaign and ask questions.

The South Pacific Independent News Network (SPINN) is not affiliated with the Government of the South Pacific and any opinions expressed in its publications are those of its authors unless otherwise stated.