Heliseum for Prime Minister! (Electric Boogaloo)

Heliseum for Prime Minister

Hello everyone! It is an honor to be considered again for the office of Prime Minister. I look forward to anwering any questions you have. I particularly want to thank @Utopia, @Lucasson, @xshotss and @Hamborn for your nominations!

I apologize for how down to the wire this came. There was a mild family emergency that delayed me on top of a very busy performing weekend. A considerable amount of this was written in the lighting booth of a shadowcast performance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Expansion and Refinement

I firstly want to direct you to successful my October 2025 Campaign. The broad strokes of my vision for the region stands. It was bright-eyed and hopeful, and what I hope to do in this campaign – and term should you elect me – is to refine that broad vision using the past two terms of experience as PM and in the Cabinet.

To be sure, many things from my original campaign were completed, and many things from it were refined over the last two terms. I am very grateful that @Utopia and I saw eye-to-eye on many programs, and much of the work that started under one administration continued in the next. In particular, from my original campaign, some highlights would include:

  • An Ambassador Corps was founded and roles were filled
  • The South Seas Gazette was brought back under a government program
  • Culture groups for events, the wiki, etc were founded
  • The Getting Involved Wizard was overhauled and turned into a starting point for executive work as well
  • Executive communication about programs, such as through the culture calendar, was greatly expanded
  • Much of the behind-the-scenes SPSF infrastructure was improved

The ship has begun turning. It has taken more time than I wished, but I am prepared to keep on pushing. Let’s get into it.

The Ministry of Culture

If I were to be elected a second time, the culture regime would remain largely the same, with some few alterations. I would intend to retain the RMB Mayor program, as well as the Newspaper, Wiki and Holidays culture groups. The Resident Spotlight group is, in my opinion, better folded into the South Seas Gazette.

I would like to see TSSG expand somewhat in scope, not in frequency but in depth. I applaud the work that @CayonNS and @Tin have done in polishing the visual style, but my push would be for more news coverage, more investigation, more centalized planning and longer issues. I’d like to look for someone to lead the Newspaper specifically, and move towards government-supported but semi-independent leadership there as a way of limiting pro-government bias.

I would also bring back the regular game nights from last time I was in office, and explore another season of the South Pacific Hockey League, pending @ProfessorHenn’s availability to simulate it.

I have noticed internally as well, that a lot of Culture planning happens in DMs between Ministers. Even understanding that it is convenient, I think this practice is bad for exposing newer members to Culture work. My goal would be to move those conversations as much as possible into the DAC to continue cultivating that space as a meaningful part of the government’s operations.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs + OWL

It has become obvious to me that for the Ambassador Corps to reach its full potential, a Deputy MoFA needs to be appointed, and I intend to do so. Their purview would be to administer the corps, conducting regular check-ins with Ambassadors and recieving reports. I would be looking for someone relatively fresh-faced for such a thing.

Otherwise, my FA goals can broadly be categorized as emboldening our voice abroad, stregthening our dignity and standing, and promoting our communitity’s values. We have many treaties that, as they tend to do when getting old, just sit unused and filled with fairly empty promises to collaborate and do events together. I want to bring life to what relationships we can by following up on as much of those ideas as we can.

I also believe that it is time that we make a greater effort to involve ourselves in the World Assembly, especially post-blank slate. We technically have an apparatus for this: The Partnership for Sovereignty, but that organization hasn’t been touched at all in my time in government. My goal would be to revive and reform it with the other members of it that would be interested in such a thing.

The Ministry of Defense

Despite the decline in the activity of raiders, the military has been making steady progress over the past several months. Quietly, in the background, many of the internal systems have been greatly improved. We now have a fairly steady stream of new cadets coming into the SPSF. There isn’t a ton to say – I encourage people to read my original agenda as Minister of Defense – but to highlight a few focuses:

Recruitment has been doing well, but the number staying for longer periods to make it to officer training is incredibly low. I want to work on a more sophisticated training scheduling system to reduce friction and barriers to training sessions. Additionally, an internal focus will be placed on the cultivation of officers, and it would be my goal to end the term with new faces in the Wardroom.

Though I do anticipate that activity will somewhat increase as it usually does in the Summer, we will need to put effort into military games and events to maintain some sort of morale. The Defender Olympics will occur during this term, so we ought to prepare for that, and I would like to return to regular Hell Detag events.

The Ministry of Integration

For a while now, the huge lift for @Trivalve and the Ministry of Integration has been the Getting Involved Wizard. Now that there has been significant progress there, energy can be moved elsewhere, such as the stregthening of a recruitment team.

In general, I understand that my own time of integrating into the community is now many years in the rearview mirror. I plan on looking to newer members of the community for greater perspectives on the process, and how we can make it smoother.

The Legislative Coordinator (working title)

I came into my first term as Prime Minister promising to use the office as a test kitchen for broad executive reform. I always felt this would also be a Legislative process, but never had the time on top of my Cabinet and Admiralty duties to spearhead such conversations myself. In a recent conversation in the Assembly, it was suggested that the executive should take charge of leading some initiatives in the Assembly, as well as promoting broad Assembly activity. I admit that a certain American-ness in me always conceptualized the two branches as fundamentally separate, but I’m willing to explore. It’s a test kitchen, right?

I plan on appointing a Legislative Coordinator (working title), whose job it would be to spearhead certain Assembly initiatives, represent the government in questions alongside myself and promote Assembly participation. I look forward to having conversations with the community about this and what boundaries we would feel comfortable having for such a role.

Conflict of Interest Statement

Within TSP, I am currently Minister of Defense, an Admiral in the SPSF, an FA Advisor, a Legislator and a Citizen. I have previously been Prime Minister (last term), Minister of Military Affairs (2020) and an Ambassador (2020). I am also an Update Commander in Libcord, the multi-regional military coalition that TSP/SPSF is a part of.

I hold no offices or citizenship in any other region, nor have I ever. My nation was founded in TSP and in TSP I have remained. I operate approximately 500 puppets used exclusively for R/D and N-Day, but have never used any of them as an alias. I have never used an alias other than “Heliseum/Heli” to interact with any region in any context.

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I’ll be directing the same questions to all PM candidates.

In the course of Assembly debates regarding the next Chair, the idea has been raised that the government should or could have an affirmative legislative agenda, akin to what we see in many RL parliamentary democracies. Which raises three questions:

(1) Do you believe that the TSP executive should have an affirmative legislative agenda, and why / why not?
(2) Will your government be pursuing a legislative agenda if you are elected Prime Minister?
(3) If so, what are your legislative priorities?

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I’ve asked the same question to Utopia.

In regards to integration and the World Assembly, what plans do you have for getting more residents involved in the WA and increasing our delegate’s endorsement count?

One of the big takeaways from the recent report published by Jiangbei (https://www.nationstates.net/page=dispatch/id=2770957) is that, while have the second highest endorsement count in the world, our regional voting power is low because our WA members are generally disinterested and don’t vote the same way as our Delegate.

How can we change this culture? This is something thay requires a whole of government approach including the Delegate?

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Thank you for these questions, Welly! I think the “Legislative Coordinator” section of my campaign answers some of these, but I’m happy to do so a bit more specifically.

Direct executive involvement in the legislature is something that I am a little unsure about, but want to experiment with over the course of this term and see how we as a community feel about it. There’s a certain American style in me that conceptualized the two branches as wholly separate, but that’s not the kind of government we have in TSP! In general, I think it makes sense for the executive to engage in an agenda that centers the executive. It would be weird for the executive to run on a legislative agenda that targets some other portion of government.

Yes. I plan on appointing a Legislative Coordinator to spearhead a legislative agenda as well as generally promote Assembly activities.

The big-ticket item will be executive reform. That is to say: greater codifying the existance of an executive beyond the Prime Minister and OWL Director. My push would be to start a conversation about permanant ministries, civil servants, and the like. We are only a couple terms removed now from repeated administrations where the entire executive consisted of 2-3 people. There was and continues to be a lot of purely executive work to fix that, but ultimately the purely executive testing phase should be followed by legislative codifying to help prevent us from falling into that situation again.

Thank you for these questions, these are really good and interesting ones! I’m sorry for how long it took me to answer – I wanted to really dig into the report you linked. I hope you’re also ok with me doing these a little bit out of order, because I want to get a some context out of the way before giving you direct answers to your questions.

For those reading that haven’t looked through this report, here are the numbers we’re working with. If you look at turnout percentage, calculated as (Average # Individual Votes) / (# Endorsements on Delegate), for the feeders, you get the following list:

  • The North Pacific: 40.87%
  • The South Pacific: 39.04%
  • The West Pacific: 33.70%
  • The East Pacific: 29.47%
  • The Pacific: 23.85%

So we can actually say that TSPers are more generally involved in the WA than other feeders, save TNP, to which we are not far behind. But the numbers you’re concerned with are how many TSPers vote in a way aligned with the Delegate. The report linked is concerned with raw voting power, so gives us an absolute net number. I want to adjust for size first, so pulled an alignment percentage for the feeders, calculated as (Average # Voters Aligned with Delegate) / (Average Total # Individual Votes). I got the following list:

  • The West Pacific: 88.00%
  • The Pacific: 84.81%
  • The North Pacific: 76.99%
  • The East Pacific: 76.67%
  • The South Pacific: 58.44%

This is where we underperform, looking from a certain perspective. And is what you are pointing out. A lot of people participate in WA voting, but our official voting recommendations don’t hold as much sway over those voters as they do in other regions. I want to look at one more thing, though, pushing the report a step forward, calculating overall voting power with: # Endorsements on Delegate + (Average # Votes Aligned withe Delegate - Average # Votes Non-Aligned with Delegate). I got the following list:

  • The North Pacific: 874.8
  • The South Pacific: 488.0
  • The West Pacific: 443.9
  • The East Pacific: 396.8
  • The Pacific: 369.0

So I do want to push back against the assertion that our voting power is low. Even considering the dissenting individual voters, our voting power is greater than any feeder save TNP. But we are lower than we potentially could be.

Any change we can make in this culture has to be tempered by a regional cultural norms. A big part of the reason the individual vote is split is our commitment to democracy that tolerates dissent. It is easier for TWP – essentially a dictatorship that rewards loyalty to its Delegate – to command votes in a certain way. General statements and pressure to vote alongside the rest of the region (which is also sometimes ordered by the Prime Minister) may not go over well.

What we can do is inform to the best of our ability. Right now, it is very easy, especially for primarily gameside folks, to overlook any reccomendation or context for a proposal outside of the displayed Delegate vote on the WA page. Particularly as we deepen a focus on the World Assembly, continue the newly-reinstated summaries that Valemora have been doing, and the like, we should do our best to make those pieces of information as easy to see and discuss as possible.

Finally, in regards to the Delegate: They can certainly be a mouthpiece for the government, as they are someone many gamesiders will look to for information, but we need to be intentional about not allowing the office to play an outsized political role.

Getting people involved in the World Assembly involves a lot of the same general themes I mentioned above: stoking discussion and making information/reccomendations known and available. I also expect that the upcoming clean slate is going to generate a lot of interest, which we should do our best to capitalize on.

As far as Endorsement Count, that really does simply rely on consistent messaging in everything we do, on top of the Delegate doing their part in tarting.

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