Fellow South Pacificans,

After some thought, I have decided to run for Prime Minister of the South Pacific. While I am new to TSP, having joined in March of this year, I have extensive experience with region-building and government in my previous regions (Renegade Islands Alliance and 10000 Islands) over the previous decade. I came to the South Pacific seeking a change of venue and experience, wanting somewhere that both enshrined my defender values and would allow me to have a new experience with democratic government. In the previous Cabinet, I served as Minister of Defense, which enabled me to become familiar with the government processes and institutions of the South Pacific.

Going into this term, I think it’s best to be honest about the challenges we’re facing as a region.

As a collective, TSP is suffering due to low activity in the summer months caused by NationStates’ worst summer slump in history. Discord and forum activity have been low recently. Independently of this, the region is facing long-term challenges as proposed game changes are likely to cut our quantity of new nation in half, forcing us to prioritize quality of engagement over quantity of nations.

Our domestic Ministries face issues with staff engagement and retaining senior leadership. While Media has experienced an unexpected renaissance under outgoing Minister Moon, maintaining a Ministry where new The Southern Journal issues are published with perfectly tuned efficiency will be difficult. Both the Ministry of Culture and Engagement struggled last term, with neither being able to retain their originally elected Minister for the duration of the term or having a deeper bench of staff members with leadership experience ready to step up in the event of a vacancy.

Our external Ministries face a different challenge of clarifying our regional sense of purpose beyond simply stating our new defender alignment. What makes TSP unique and appealing as a defender region has been central to the challenges faced by the Ministry of Defense in the past term and is vitally important for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to consider moving forward. Relatedly, the Partnership for Sovereignty SC bloc that was long awaited has been ratified and is continuing to expand, but our internal WA infrastructure is in complete disarray. Fixing the structural flaws within the current OWL framework to allow TSP to grow into a true WA power will be my top priority.

Regardless of the outcomes of individual races, this Cabinet will across the board be younger and less experienced than the previous one. Witchcraft and Sorcery’s Cabinet was successful largely due to having a large set of vocal, motivated, and experienced Ministers stepping up to the plate, most of them with previous government experience in TSP or elsewhere. By comparison, none of the currently declared domestic Ministry candidates have Cabinet experience in TSP (or comparable experience elsewhere). This youth is a positive rather than a negative: it creates better space for teamwork and collaboration without too many strong egos dictating discussions and gives Cabinet members space to grow into their roles throughout the term. In a young Cabinet like this one, hands on and proactive leadership from the Prime Minister, acting as a central cog coordinating activities within the team, is especially important.

With that preface, I want to turn my attention to specific areas.

Office of WA Legislation

My top policy priority for the upcoming term is to fix the inactivity in the Office of WA Legislation.

As was discussed by the Cabinet and then the Assembly, OWL has not been living up to its responsibilities recently to provide timely voting recommendations for the Delegate to act upon in World Assembly votes. Early efforts at reform conducted by Director @anjo to move more discussion to Discord were productive in generating actual back-and-forth dialogue but, based on the slowdown in OWL, did not go far enough to reduce staff overhead in starting discussions and releasing recommendations. For a brief time after these discussions, OWL’s performance improved remarkably but it has once again slipped with four consecutive ‘No Recommendation’ WA votes, including on “Against Destructive Raiding Practices”, a priority for our WA voting bloc and broader foreign policy which Delegate Amerion was unable to cast an early vote For. In addition to failing to produce voting recommendations, OWL is failing its task of building WA literacy and back-and-forth engagement among South Pacificans on WA issues, largely feeding a stagnant and non-interactive RMB.

During the transition period between Cabinets, I will take open applications for any legislator wishing to be OWL Director. I may also approach some privately as well to see if they may have interest in the position. I will ask anyone interested in the position about their vision for OWL in the upcoming term, with specific emphasis on how to increase discussion in voting and lessen the staff workload. Before making an appointment, the prospective Director and I would agree on a shared vision and then maintain regular dialogue throughout the term on how to bring that vision into reality.

The two core goals for OWL during my term are:

• Restructuring OWL’s voting process to lower staff labor burdens, thus enabling more regular polling and release of voting recommendations.
  
• By holding more regular voting discussions, OWL would cultivate a community of WA debaters, with hopes of educating new TSPers over the long term in order to train better WA advocates and authors.
  

Internal Cabinet Management

In this upcoming term, proactive centralized leadership by the Prime Minister will be vitally important to ensuring smooth Cabinet operations. As in the previous two terms, I’ll be keeping the separate system of Foreign and Domestic Councils. For both Councils, I intend to hold a beginning of term “conversation” among the relevant Ministers to set the agenda and identify areas for collaboration.

With high energy but less experienced Ministers on the domestic side, regular check-ins, helping Ministers make relevant contacts, and stepping up to get my hands dirty on key projects. Overall, I intend to prioritize my focus on the domestic Ministries in the upcoming term as this is where we are facing the biggest issues and where our Ministers are the least experienced. In contrast, we are highly likely to have externally focused Ministers who have served successful terms in their portfolio in the past. For the external Ministries, my focus will be on providing advice and counsel when requested and taking leadership in scenarios where coordination is essential. In foreign affairs “crisis” scenarios, I intend to take leadership of the situation by first gathering all the facts from relevant sources, determining the correct regional position on the issue after internal Cabinet discussion, and then maintaining consistency in projecting that position publicly and communicating it to our friends and allies.

For all Ministers and the OWL Director, I’ll be utilizing a policy of weekly check-ins – a direct discussion with the Minister each week to discuss what projects they are working on, the steps they’re taking to get there, how their staff is doing, and any areas where they need assistance from me or to directly coordinate with another Ministry. Achieving goals requires reverse engineering from the result we want through every step required to get there, an exercise I’m prepared to go through with my Ministers to help brainstorm and then check-in with them to ensure things stay on track.

Public Accountability and Messaging

Sandaoguo’s Cabinet had great success with one Cabinet Hall meeting on Discord. Witchcraft and Sorcery’s Cabinet did not replicate this success, with Cabinet meetings that were hosted having generally poor attendance and failing to generate energy surrounding executive government. I don’t believe this was a deficit of the hosting of the event, but perhaps just an indication that when TSP has generally lower activity (as it has over the summer) it becomes difficult to host large-scale live events.

In place of this sporadic engagement, I will utilize fortnightly updates from the Cabinet to keep the Assembly informed about progress on projects. Every two weeks, I will spearhead the release of a Cabinet update which documents recent actions in each Ministry (generally in bullet point form) as well as Cabinet-wide decisions and news.

As it relates to managing contentious or controversial issues, I will endeavor to be proactive about gathering information and clearly communicating the process and decision-making used by the Cabinet to the Assembly. It is my hope that by being conscientious and clearly documenting the Cabinet’s actions, we will make better decisions that we are more prepared to defend to the Assembly.

With all of that said, I am eager for the opportunity to serve as Prime Minister of the South Pacific and am happy to answer questions from members of the Assembly.

Conflict of Interest
I am currently Minister of Defense of the South Pacific. I am also an Officer of the South Pacific Special Forces, Ambassador to the Realm of Balder, and a member of the staff of the Ministries of Culture and Engagement as well as OWL.
Abroad, I am a citizen of Spiritus (2021).
In the past, I have served as WA Delegate, Minister, Senator, and several other positions within 10000 Islands (2010-2013, 2015-7, 2019-21). I also served as Chief Executive/Founder, WA Delegate, and Minister of Renegade Islands Alliance (2013-5).

Minister of Foreign Affairs
General of the South Pacific Special Forces
Ambassador to Balder
Former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense

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Full support for this campaign, don't really have many specific questions

Local Councilroar.

Selfie

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How will you address any future internal conflict in the Cabinet?

It's very obvious that there was internal strife surrounding Quebecshire, but this Cabinet, following the mistakes of previous ones, chose to keep everything under wraps. Even when the minister completely quit the Discord server, there was no explanation, just a one-line message that he decided to "take a break." When he came back, the responses to questions were disingenuous and the Assembly still has no clear answers on what happened.

TSP's Cabinet, in general, can tend to fall into being a black box. Nobody knows what's going on inside, until the box explodes and the Assembly has to handle a crisis. What will HS's Cabinet do to change the pattern, should internal conflict arise?

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Thank you for your questions. 
 

How will you address any future internal conflict in the Cabinet?

Proactive leadership will be central to how I address future internal conflict in the Cabinet.

As situations arise, my role as Prime Minister is to act as both a mediator and a leader in any potential personality or policy conflicts within the Cabinet. As a mediator, I will strive to collect all available information to better understand all sides of a potential conflict and endeavor to act as an honest broker to all sides of the dispute. However, serving as a mediator does not mean I will seek to split the difference on every issue, rather my goal will be to reach correct solutions (using all available information) that are workable for the remainder of the term and then, where possible, to lead the Cabinet by example in moving forward on those issues. Part of this involves an honesty with other members of the Cabinet, including clearly documenting decision-making processes or decision rationales. In the case of conflicts that relate more to personality rather than substance, my goal will be to set "rules of the road" for communication between the involved Cabinet members.

When I say "proactive" leadership, this means I will prioritize being on top of issues as they arise rather than allowing them to fester. Whenever we look back at issues in leadership or work arrangements, we often find there were hints of issues simmering long before they erupted and became larger issues. Sometimes, those simmering issues work themselves out, but oftentimes they do not and then become a significant issue. As Prime Minister, I will keep an eye on those issues to try to address them before they erupt.
 

TSP's Cabinet, in general, can tend to fall into being a black box. Nobody knows what's going on inside, until the box explodes and the Assembly has to handle a crisis. What will HS's Cabinet do to change the pattern, should internal conflict arise?

Should internal conflict arise, the first step is for myself as Prime Minister to attempt to mediate and resolve the conflict (as explained above). To me, not all conflicts need to be brought to the attention of the Assembly until they begin to undermine the Cabinet's ability to work together. Conflicts are inevitable, and to some extent desirable as it is good to have a variety of perspectives on policy questions, but as long as disagreements are contained to the specific policy areas they originate from, they are not necessarily explosions which must be put forward to the Assembly.

Internal conflicts need to be seen by the Assembly when internal efforts to mediate and resolve the conflict have failed and the disagreement/dispute is negatively impacting the Cabinet's ability to execute its agenda. On the whole, I am somewhat skeptical of the idea that the Assembly's view is always the best solution to internal Cabinet conflicts, and believe part of why we have a Prime Minister and a Cabinet that is afforded some degree of shielding from immediate public view is because we place some faith in the Cabinet to resolve internal conflicts itself and believe having that opportunity first is beneficial to the Cabinet's smooth functioning. The Assembly's sunshine-like disinfectant is best in cases where the Cabinet has already failed to address those conflicts, which are the scenarios where I would open things up for Assembly review.

Minister of Foreign Affairs
General of the South Pacific Special Forces
Ambassador to Balder
Former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense

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