A Stronger South Pacific - Jay for PM

Election Central
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Jay for Prime Minister of the South Pacific

Hello friends! I once again present to you my campaign for the position of Prime Minister of the South Pacific. My campaign focuses on sweeping reform to optimize the cabinet’s activities, instill a strong gameside presence amongst the cabinet, and make the South Pacific’s presence in the broader NationStates community more visible. Since joining TSP in April 2024, I have served as Secretary of Culture, Minister of Culture, Minister of Integration, and an Ensign in the SPSF, and hope to increase my involvement further. I spent a lot of time and effort on this campaign, and I hope you vote for me once you cast your ballot. If you have any questions about anything related to my campaign, feel free to ask away.

Culture

Replacing Culture Groups with a more coherent, simpler system

While Culture Groups were introduced with good intentions, in practice they have struggled with activity and engagement, mostly because they are a much less involved position, are hard to maintain, and are less effective in getting people interested in the government. This is why I am bringing back an older, tested and proven method of expanding the culture team while retaining that involved and low-risk nature that allows people to experiment and gain valuable experience.

In short, I will appoint two secretaries (through applications) that assist the Minister of Culture in a much more direct and involved way. The Minister of Culture is responsible for coaching and assigning certain tasks to their secretaries, taking a lot of valuable time off of their hands while also giving valuable experience to their secretaries. The Secretary of Culture position is an easy way for aspiring members to take part in government and contribute, while also being in a low-risk environment assisted by the Minister of Culture. A testament to this is my previous role as a Secretary of Culture, which inspired me to get a cabinet position, and I further progressed in the region after that.

An Independent Newspaper team

The South Seas Gazette, as most of you have seen, has experienced a lot of delays and inefficiency issues (due to the newspaper team containing inactive members, a lack of coordination between the MoC and the PM, too much work being put on one person, etc…).
I will replace this with a separate newspaper team, acting as an separate culture group, that writes for the newspaper, and writes about events after they happen, not at the end of the month. I think a more flexible format that allows us to send separate articles, where we can commission different people with different skills for each article, would work best.

Events!

I will not be changing much with any of the events that the Ministry of Culture hosts. To keep this campaign as short as possible, the events that I intend to hold are:

  • Pollmaster elections (previously known as RMB Mayor)
  • VC Game nights
  • Smaller scale gameside contests (i.e culinary contest, writing contest, banner contest, etc…)
  • Smaller scale offsite contests (i.e CANS, Kahoot, and any other games…)
    and so on..

Integration

I have accomplished many of my goals in my previous term as Minister of Integration, and using the amount of experience I have gained during this period, I will keep maintaining most of the projects I had started, as well as continue the ones I couldn’t get the time to finish.

Initatives that I will continue:

  • Recruiter Competitions: The Recruiter competition is a competition where recruiters try to send as many telegrams as possible within a specified time fame, and whoever wins gets recognition and cards. The ministry will host the recruiter competitions once again this term. See: this dispatch
  • Telegram Template Competition: A competition where recruiters write a telegram template (the actual telegram sent to recruited nations), and then they recruit with it for a specified time, and then the winner of said contest’s template be used as the recommended starter template.
  • NS Bot: A bot that welcomes new nations on the RMB, sends telegrams to new members of the World Assembly, and other activities that have been discussed. I developed a significant part of this during my term of MoI (more specifically the welcoming new people on the RMB part), but will continue and finish this in my term as Prime Minister.
  • WARTN: Where Are They Now is an initiative to collect statistics on the state of engagement within the region. See: this dispatch
  • Coconut Awards: The Coconut Awards are a set of monthly awards that commemorate our members through RMB and general/government awards. This is an idea I revived as Minister of integration, and will continue to do so in my term as Prime Minister. See: May Edition, June Edition

I will also be starting a new initiative, which is:

  • Technical Recruitment Whitepaper: A new “guide”/whitepaper, that I will add to the list of guides (which I wrote!), that explain the technicality of manual/API recruitment, how the recruitment queue works, and anything relevant to recruitment. This will be crucial if we or a future integration team decide to build tools on their own, or want to improve existing ones, to better the recruitment technology we have. Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to find this information unless you’re deeply immersed in the system, so this will benefit recruiters quite a lot.

Defense

In my Premiership, I will host R/D events to keep our soldiers occupied and our morale high, for a happy defender is a productive defender–and while defenderdom currently occupies a strong position, we need something for our soldiers to do. These events include:

  • chase and detag practice
  • fun R/D events such as a SPSF promotional poster contest, themed R/D puppets, etc.. in exchange for cards and recognition

I also want to bring back the SPSF service reports. Service reports are a report of how the SPSF have been doing in the last X amount of time (i.e. amount of updates participated in, detags done, etc…). What is also included in service reports are awards and medals, of which are very important for the morale of our defenders and give hard-working people recognition.

Besides that, I will look for areas in improvement to optimize SPSF operation such as better tracking of ready-to-be-trained Cadets, a more structured (i.e using a flexible script) training format, and so on. In this area, I don’t have much specifics, but more of a plan to continuously improve and optimize the SPSF’s operations alongside the MoD and the Admiralty.

Foreign Affairs

It has been relatively successful times for the South Pacific in terms of foreign affairs and the interest of the Coalition. With the dawn of us securing a spot in GenSec for our allies, as well as raiderdom being significantly weakened, we have a great opportunity to build upon this success and get our name out there.

In my term as Prime Minister, I will set a few policies and start new measures to dictate how we present the region to the broader NS community. This includes:

  • Building relations: Under my term, we will build relations with existing allies and establish relations with promising regions. Through constructive communication, events, reaching a middle ground on any possible points of conflict, we can achieve friendlier relations with many parts of the interregional space.

  • GA Neutrality: As some of you may know, the General Assembly is commonly split up into two “factions” or ideologies: International Federalism (using the General Assembly as a tool for interregional good), and National Sovereignty (the opposing of the majority of General Assembly legislation due to the limit on sovereignty). The South Pacific is quite well known as neutral, while leaning to the International Federalist side—however, this is only true in the sense of the majority of our WA-active people voluntarily being IntFed themselves, and not really through any government-sponsored activity. Under my cabinet, this will be continued, for both collaboration between both sides, as well as maintaining our close relations with various regions with differing views in the GA ideology spectrum. Some of our allies are NatSov, some of them are IntFed, so we must work together with both sides, and not sway either side.

  • The South Pacific, a Defender Powerhouse: There is another split in regions: defenders and invaders (there are independents, but for the sake of the point I’m making, they are not mentioned). Raiders try to take regions, while defenders stop them, of which the South Pacific is a defender region. Under my government, we will continue to further the strength of defender regions, through collaboration, growth, and scouting for Aegis, the defender military alliance. Not only that, but we will be establishing a structured Security Council presence for defenders through further collaboration with Aegis as well as setting up treaties and voting blocs, to ensure that raiders can never come back from their state of incompetence and failure, and that the glorious allied and our own militaries’ success continues growing.

Gameside Presence

In my term as Prime Minister, I hope to significantly increase the game side presence of the cabinet. I have a couple ideas to implement this, mostly installing a cabinet-wide policy to, at the very least, establish some sort of presence on the RMB. Through consistent posting on the Regional Message Board, interacting with the broader gameside community, and making the government much more accessible to every member of the South Pacific (using dispatches, RMB posts, etc… for every announcement), I hope to accomplish a much greater cabinet presence on the site itself.

World Assembly/OWL

The Office of World Assembly Legislation (also known as OWL) has seen a lot of meaningful reforms, including the introduction of new World Assembly authors into the scene, moving the votes to the forums for accessibility, and other changes that have made it a more successful institution with a lot of potential. In my term as Prime Minister, I plan to use this opportunity to expand OWL further and increase our presence in the World Assembly.

World Assembly legislation as a beginner can be quite challenging. In my term, I will introduce a larger structured mentorship program, where newbies to the WA sphere can be mentored and coauthored by an experienced WA author, to build their experience and help them through getting their proposal noticed and passed. Also, I plan to write new guides for both GA and SC writing, that can be referenced at any time and used for guidance if an author is lost or does not know where to start.

I’ll also be using this mentorship program and the encouragement of WA authorship to build up and scout potential South Pacifican candidates for GenSec. While the GenSec elections will not be happening in my term as Prime Minister if I do get elected, I will be training promising prospects to establish a history of natives of our region running for this position, and installing a culture of South Pacificans in influential WA positions.

Experience + Conflict of Interest

I joined the South Pacific in early April of 2024, and since then, I have held the positions of:

  • Secretary of Culture under Silva
  • Minister of Culture
  • 2x Ensign of the South Pacific Special Forces (current)
  • Minister of Integration
    ..as well as Legislator and Citizen, of course!

If you want to see a more in-depth version, check out my forum profile.

Foreign Involvement:

  • Resident and Member of Congress in the Democratic Socialist Assembly
    (although I’d like to point out my involvement there is limited and I’ve already sent my resignation in)

Concluding Statement

We have so much potential as a region, and especially as a feeder, yet we have neglected parts of our region for too long. To put it bluntly, if you want a Prime Minister that is going to optimize the cabinet’s activities by removing bloat from our institutions, someone who will listen to the people and take action, someone who has what it takes to reform the region, and someone who will make the South Pacific known to the outside, then I ask you to vote for me.

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I have released my campaign in-game as a dispatch here:
https://www.nationstates.net/page=dispatch/id=2799651
Again, if you have any questions, feel free to ask!

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Culture groups have been very efficient, uniting all into two secretaries will slow down regional flow and can add more delay to things like TSSG, H&E (etc.)

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Some culture groups have been unused (the wiki, for example, or the redundant nature of having a separate culture group just for resident spotlights), and many have just been inactive. Using a system of two active secretaries, and smart time management, can effectively solve this problem. Calling culture groups very efficient I find is a bit strange, considering the delays TSSG has experienced, the inactivity of MoC Wiki, Resident Spotlight, and Holidays and Events, the amount of frustration that the community has voiced against the content being released by Culture, and so on. In fact, the culture groups have essentially been acting similar to the secretary system, where only a very select few people actually participate or do anything in their culture group.

Well, that is simply untrue. The South Seas Gazette has been consistently delayed for around 15 days. And I am not getting rid of the newspaper team, as stated in my campaign, it will stay an independent group of editors that write articles for events as they happen, not weeks after they occur, allowing the secretaries and the minister to work on holidays and events, which are simply not difficult to handle.

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Well, Jay, great campaign. I just have two questions.

Foreign Affairs

You have outlined ambitions to expand diplomatic relations, maintain GA neutrality, and strengthen the defender movement. However, these goals may sometimes conflict, for example, closer coordination with Aegis and a more structured Security Council presence could be perceived as taking a stronger stance in interregional conflicts. How will your government balance strengthening the South Pacific’s role as a defender power while maintaining its reputation as a neutral and approachable diplomatic actor to regions across the ideological spectrum?

World Assembly/OWL

You have proposed expanding OWL through mentorship programmes, writing guides, and developing future World Assembly leaders. How will you ensure that OWL remains an impartial body that encourages diverse participation, rather than becoming a system where established authors or a particular WA viewpoint have disproportionate influence over which proposals receive support and visibility?

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Thank you Qaz for these meaningful questions! I’ll answer them one by one.

This is actually a great question, but you must understand something. I do not plan to have any neutrality in raiding/defending, and will maintain the South Pacific as a defender region, as we always have been. My government will balance neutrality in some areas, and taking a side in others. GA neutrality is required due to our close relations with both NatSov and IntFed regions, and the fact that our community can choose what it wants to follow based on their opinion—however, we simply do not establish relations with raider regions. If you look at all of our allies, they’re all defenders or independent. Basically, we will not be pursuing any sort of reconciliation with regions that indiscriminately raid innocent regions, because we have never done that, nor are raiders currently influential enough for that to even do anything, and that’d likely cause a diplomatic disaster between us and our defender friends. What I’ll do is continue to build our defender army, continue to establish the South Pacific as a defender region, but I will not be furthering any GA agenda, for reasons stated above.

That’s a very interesting question, and it’s something I think is important to get right.

The purpose of the mentorship program is to make OWL more accessible, not less. WA legislation, in its current state, is quite challenging for beginners due to the steep learning curve and a lot of things that you just “need to know” from experience, kind of like unwritten rules. A mentorship program would exist to navigate this issue, not determine which proposal is “worthy” to support.

I don’t see mentors acting as gatekeepers or approving proposals before they’re discussed, nor would they have much of any influence on what the proposal’s topic would cover. Their role would simply be to provide feedback on drafting and navigating the proposal process, much like how experienced members already help newcomers informally.

Just as importantly, I have no intention of tying mentorship to any particular WA ideology. The South Pacific has long maintained a tradition of General Assembly neutrality, and I intend to preserve that. The goal is to produce informed and skilled authors, not authors who think a certain way—that is why mentors should act as neutral teachers and not someone who only approves of or supports proposals based on their personal GA ideology. A mentor might teach you the general structure of GA proposals (such as the preamble, clauses, etc..) and the rules, whether written or not (such as the established GA rules, and commonly followed principles in drafting), but they won’t teach you why either side of the GA ideology spectrum is better or more correct than the other.

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Thank you for your answers. Another one popped into my head.

Do you think there is room for older users to flourish anew in the region? If so, how?

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Well yes, of course! You can take multiple different paths if you are an older/more experienced user looking to start over. However, the one I’d recommend is just to start with an introductory cabinet position, such as ministry staff or anything related, using the experience you already have while building on it with new information that might’ve not been the same when you were around. Because we are a constantly evolving region, with lots of new ways to do things and the cabinet’s structure changing constantly, it’s important and safer to just start out like a normal new player. After you’ve refreshed your knowledge of the region, and you got to know your specific ministries much better, you can try for a minister position. After that, the progression is natural, from minister, to Prime Minister/Delegate, or to other TSP venues like the Assembly and a bunch of other institutions. That has always been my way of getting involved in general, not just for older users, and is what I used to get involved!

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The wiki is used a lot. There are 1321 articles

Proof?

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The wiki is used a lot, not the MoC: Wiki group itself.
That’s actually not what the wiki group has been used for. The wiki is quite messy, with outdated information (I think the wiki somewhere still shows myself as the most recent Minister of Culture from 2024). While writing articles was one of the goals of this culture group, it simply failed to gain traction on getting more people to clean up the wiki. I’d also like to add that the majority of these articles are RP articles, not official government articles.

I will admit that I accidentally misworded that statement, but I was mostly referring to the discontent about how TSSG is set up. You can see the discussions in #government-discussion on the Discord:
https://discord.com/channels/121429943262511104/766109092909416460/1525629540913778688
https://discord.com/channels/121429943262511104/766109092909416460/1526654070742450338
I’m pretty sure there’s more, you can scroll up and read the general conversation.

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This is a very good campaign!

I have a few questions:

  • Your idea of making the format for TSSG more flexible by encouraging the writing of articles for events as they happen, rather than hapharzardly throwing them together to meet a deadline is a good one. However, your solution is to create another culture group, which you elsewhere stated “have struggled with activity and engagement”, and, if I’m reading correctly, suggested combining into two. Would the group responsible for TSSG be one of these, or am I misunderstanding this? And what particular benefits do you think would arise from such a structural change (the creation of a separate culture group for TSSG), and why would this one be different from the current group?
  • I love the goal of ensuring your cabinet establishes a gameside presence. Do you have any plans for how to enforce this, though? And how much will prior gameside activity be factored into who you choose to fill your cabinet?
  • This question will be posed to all candidates: TSP, as a proud defender region, has established a strong working relationship with our defender allies in the SC. However, we have frequently found ourselves somewhat isolated from the international community in the GA. Do you have any plans for fostering cooperation and collaberation in the GA between TSP and other regions?
  • And, most importantly: you have vocally chosen to remain neutral in the great dessert wars. Why should we accept such a display of cowardice??? Does this mean no free ice cream???
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Yes, it would essentially act as a culture group, but it wouldn’t be the same. As I already mentioned, Culture would be split into the secretaries and a dedicated newspaper team, with the newspaper team writing articles on events as they happen. Since this team would be much smaller, much more focused on a single activity (the newspaper), and able to spread writing responsibilities among members with knowledge of specific areas of TSP, I think it can perform much more effectively. Also, not only that, but the newspaper team would be able to reach out to various members of the South Pacific, to ask them on their opinion and to obtain crucial information on events that are happening in their specific field of experience (i.e the SPSF, roleplay, etc…)

Also, having a separate team that can work in a more decentralized way is much more effective than the current newspaper culture group. While there is already a newspaper culture group, the overwhelming majority of the work has been piled onto the Minister themselves, including writing articles personally or simply being vested with the sole authority of deciding when work on articles begins. This is, in my opinion, a much less effective system for an initiative that has the potential to be a great success. I want the newspaper team to work with all of the ministries, the broader government, roleplay moderators, the SPSF Admirality, active legislators, and so on to obtain the correct information and compile a much more coherent article for each event. I’d also like to add (if it wasn’t clear) that the Minister of Culture and their secretaries would still oversee each article and make sure its quality is up to standards, as well as reach out to myself/my FA minister if necessary (i.e if an article could have any foreign affairs implications).

My support for removing the Culture Groups is mostly directed at the groups other than the newspaper group, because I think a dedicated newspaper team is a good idea if it’s utilized correctly.

Thank you! And truly, as an active gamesider myself, I think it is something we should be expecting nowadays.

Well first of all, I’d require and encourage my cabinet members to maintain some form of gameside presence, including but not limited to jumping in on conversations in the RMB, encouraging questions about the ministry through telegram, and any other way they’d like to implement that. I will also be ensuring that all official government announcements are visible and easily accessible to gamesiders through dispatches.

For appointing ministers, previous gameside activity will definitely be considered. I simply won’t appoint a minister who only opens the game to not CTE, to put it bluntly. However, if they had some form of gameside presence in the past, and will improve on that in this term, I am willing to consider them.

Great question! So the simple answer is yes, definitely, but I don’t think the solution is to abandon our GA neutrality. In fact, we can use this to our advantage in catalyzing collaboration with other regions. As I have mentioned, we have friendly relations with both sides of the GA ideology spectrum. Because we aren’t committed to advancing any particular GA agenda, we are in a unique position to collaborate with both sides through finding common ground between us. I also want to strengthen OWL through the mentorship program and new writing guides I’ve proposed. By encouraging more South Pacificans to write legislation and become active in the World Assembly, we naturally create more opportunities to collaborate with authors from other regions. Not only do we need diplomacy to collaborate with other regions in the GA, we also need skilled authors that are available to collaborate in the first place. That is why I think that we should encourage authors to reach out to both sides, reach some sort of common ground, and ensure that their proposal is beneficial to everyone.

And part of this is also a general effect from one of my FA policies, which is establishing and deepening relations with other regions. GA collaboration included in said treaties would be very beneficial to us, and would also naturally allow us to collaborate further with our allies in the GA, in areas of mutual interest.

Well I’m an Independent, which means I’m not a dessertist at all, so if I do get elected I’ll let you all have fun dessert debates while we get things done!

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The South Pacific is quite well known as an IntFed region, not a neutral region. Our members and citizenry lean heavily IntFed and we’ve had multiple PM candidates across different elections run with an explicitly IntFed WA policy. The lack of officially declared position is not a declaration of neutrality; we are just a region that is able to work and cooperate with others even across ideological lines.

Do you intend to continue TSP’s IntFed status quo, or do you intend to actively shift TSP into a position much more closely straddling the boundary?

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How would you describe your leadership style, person-to-person? What is your approach to working with Cabinet ministers or staffers that work at your direction?

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I agree with you in the sense that we are IntFed due to our citizenry being majority Intfed. However, at a baseline position, there is nothing requiring anyone to be IntFed, nor can Prime Ministers legally sway GA votes based on ideology. What I’m trying to say is that our citizenry may be majority IntFed, but my government won’t run with an explicitly IntFed WA policy, as you said. My government won’t come out here and say “hey, we’re an IntFed region”, but our OWL votes might still end up in IntFed resolutions being voted for, which is fine. I’d also like to add that the new GA reset has made it much easier for different ideologies to collaborate, so that is something we can utilize when working with both ideologies. Ultimately, considering our even closest allies, declaring ourselves as IntFed and having an IntFed agenda, could have an inverse effect on our relations. The status quo won’t be much more than “the citizens vote for IntFed resolutions, but they can support whichever they want, and the government takes no side”, that’s pretty much it.

My leadership style as a Prime Minister would be a mix of involved and letting cabinet ministers do their job. I think people perform well when they’re free to complete their objectives, considering that the PM actively checks in on them and answers whatever questions they might have. I’d keep a consistent line of communication while also doing weekly major checkups on what they’ve accomplished the previous week, and remind them of their objectives next week. (although I’d like to add that these would not be some sort of rigid, consistent thing, as there might be quieter weeks for cabinet than others, so it depends on what they have on the table to complete).

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