Hello Legislators. Since a considerable amount of time has passed since the change in the way Ministers are chosen was changed, I would really like to hear your opinion on this.
I’ve been wondering about this for a while now, I don’t know exactly why. Perhaps my main concern here is regarding newcomers and I really don’t know which of the two methods is better overall. I can see positive points in both, but I think the current situation, i.e., the issue that many demonstrated should be the priority of the Cabinet (integration), can be improved by changing this point.
I think our old system (of electing Ministers) works better in relation to new people, in a certain way.
Especially considering that it is much better to apply for an office and show your project than to simply wait for a PM to choose you and yet you have the chance to have to comply with his agenda, not yours
I was and to some degree still am skeptical of the appointed Cabinet but I think there’s a lot more folks can do than “simply wait,” and if they do not like the Prime Minister’s agenda then they can and should voice that disagreement (as they could and should with an elected minister).
Indeed, but still. I think it is much better if we have our own candidates with their own agendas for each Ministry rather than just one person who can define what they want for all of them. Not to mention that I believe that just by people applying they have much more visibility than they would normally have if they didn’t.
Furthermore, it would be much easier to decide what we would like to see for each Ministry. A PM might have a great project for the MoC, for example, but not have much of an idea about what to do with the MoFA, for example, so how would we be? If we had elected Ministers, things would be easier and better to charge and monitor
I think a lot of your arguments are similar to the ones I made two years ago, but I don’t know that things would be easier to ‘monitor’ with an elected Cabinet — especially if our current pattern of executive oversight is not lacking but actually too intense. That’s especially true if our ministers go into an elected Cabinet with the mindset of not having to comply with anyone else’s agenda. When I defended our elected Cabinet structure, I said it was not a recipe for disunity, because I imagined a team of people with different policy interests coming together to work as a team, in a way that allows the Prime Minister to serve as a facilitator. If we think of just a collection of individuals working on their projects, complying with nobody’s but their agenda, to get their visibility, then I don’t think we’re building a coherent institution of collective leadership — we’re just giving people work to do.
I think it’s proved disastrous and has had a significant effect on reducing government and regional activity. In the past each Minister had their own policy objectives, ideas and mandates and whilst not all of them managed to deliver on them the Cabinet served as the engine of the region.
I’m strongly in favour of going back to an elected Cabinet.
The Prime Minister does not have to be an expert in every field. If they appoint ministers, they believe that the candidate they select is a well-rounded expert in that field. If that very Prime Minister needs help in the foreign affairs field, they should appoint a MoFA who can coordinate diplomatic relationships smoothly and is likely experienced in the field. The Prime Minister needs to take their strengths and weaknesses into account when they form their Cabinet.
I’m not endorsing appointed ministers, I’m actually pretty torn on the topic. There are pros and cons to both sides. But using the quoted argument doesn’t prove the point of elected ministers are better, in my opinion.
That is one of the points that worries me most here.
Fair enough, but suppose a PM wants to focus on a certain thing in an area within a Ministry that the region may deem less important, with elected Ministers, this would not happen, since each Ministry would have its “independent” Minister, with their own agendas and policies, we would not need to sacrifice something to get something else.
In a world of elected ministers, the Prime Minister does not act separate of their Cabinet. They don’t have one specific job—they coordinate major things and help out where it’s needed. They keep the Cabinet in check. But the Cabinet isn’t divided to the point where ministers act independently and separately of the Prime Minister.
I’ll post my thoughts on this later (I don’t feel like doing so now), but I have a quick question. In a system with elected Ministers, does the PM retain the ability to just dismiss Ministers at will?
To clarify this point–what empowered the PM to keep the Cabinet in check and ensure that ministers could not act independently of the PM? Did the Charter authorize the PM to issue orders to the ministers that they were legally obligated to obey? If a minister wanted to pursue a project with which the PM disagreed, or vice versa, what mechanism did the PM have to stop them?
Just trying to get a sense of how the old system worked in formulating my views here.
Referencing this post which shows the March 2023 changes to the Charter.
With elected ministers, the Prime Minister was in charge of overseeing the collective Cabinet agenda. While each minister was elected on a different platform, the Cabinet would usually convene privately to discuss its agenda for the term. The agenda usually mixes and mashes central ideas from each minister’s campaign.
If there was a dispute within the Cabinet, “majority decision and collective responsibility” were the decision makers. The Prime Minister did not have a weighted vote, and their sole vote should not decide anything.
The Charter was a little vague in stating that the Prime Minister “may give directions or instructions to the ministers.” You’d probably have to ask someone else about what that meant exactly.
Admittedly, I’m not the best person to ask regarding these questions. There are plenty of reasons why, which I can get into later. I probably did a sub-par job answering them, so you might have to go to Discord or ask someone else here.
Initially, there were no specific powers (it was just expected by convention that ministers listened to the PM). That usually worked, until we had a few rowdy ministers at one point, when we added a few provisions to help with that (see [PASSED] Improve Prime Minister Powers (tspforums.xyz)), after which the PM had the ability to more directly set (and overrule) executive policy with a simple majority (with their own vote counting in case of a tie).
I’d say that amended system works fine. It later allowed me to do something like Report on the situation within MoRA (tspforums.xyz) because it was necessary, without unduly influencing the policies of the individual ministers who were elected for their policies.
Onto the thread topic itself: Full support going back to the old system with PM and individually elected ministers. It’s fairly unique in the GCRs and while it’s certainly not perfect, it has its own unique flairs fitting the South Pacific.
I do think it merits thinking about some adjustments to the old system. One of the arguments for PM-appointed ministers was flexibility, but we can do something with elected ministers too. TRR has a really unique system where they have Officers (equivalent to our Ministers) that are elected “without portfolio” and the Delegate (who is their Head of Government, like our PM) selects the portfolio of the officers they get from the election. I wouldn’t want to do it exactly like that, but some ideas of that sort could be cool, e.g. we could say that we have one IRV ballot for Cabinet ministers (sans PM) and pick the top 4 of those to be in Cabinet together with a separately elected PM. Or numerous other interesting possibilities!
I need to mention, because this keeps getting lost when the issue you just raised comes up, that back when the Delegate had an executive role they were perfectly capable of leading the Cabinet into a coherent agenda without having many powers to explicitly “order” ministers around. It was only when the Prime Minister was restored that people suddenly decided that the PM did not have the power or the authority to be assertive in running the Cabinet.
My point is that with elected ministers comes the obvious conclusion that ministers should not be ordered around; after all, they would’ve been elected on the merits of their own individual platforms. That said, the PM would’ve also been elected on a comprehensive regional platform and so we should just all recognise the fact that compromise will be necessary, that the PM should probably not micromanage what ministers do, and that ministers should still recognise the authority of the PM to set a common regional agenda even if it means letting go of some of their individual priorities.
Well, it’s interesting, I don’t think I would be 100% opposed to that idea. But with this “mixed” system, would the decisions still be made by the PM as is or something made by the entire Cabinet?
Although I would still think it would be better if candidates could, in a certain way, have their own agenda, and I don’t see how we would fit that into it
So, just to clarify, why is the assumption that returning to individually elected Ministers (not a fan) will resolve the identified problem of an inactive executive? Are there other issues that have been identified? What’s up with this?