Wittenberg

Government can be a challenging and thankless experience.  People have questions and demands, sometimes folks are rude to you, and there's a lot of tedious chores involved.  This means that people get bored or annoyed with their government posts quickly, enthusiastic people lose interest, and interesting stuff falls by the wayside.

Additionally, we have a lot of jobs that don't always have something to do, and so some of the less-active ones get staffed with less-active people.  That doesn't work out well when actual need arises.  The Avocat-Xheneral doesn't have much to do day-to-day, but it's still an important position, for example.  We are lucky enough to have an attentive and active Avocat-Xheneral, but at times in the past we have not been so fortunate.

The solution is to minimize administrative red tape and make the government more efficient.  Fewer small, tedious tasks means more room for enthusiastic projects.  Less bureaucracy means more room for genuine activity.  Let's get government out of the way.

Consolidate positions.  Where possible, preference should be given to someone active and letting them serve multiple positions, as opposed to picking less active people to round out the numbers.  If the active person encounters a crisis they're not equipped to handle, then they can ask for help from someone with more expertise but less attention.

Seek out new citizens and offer them a task.  New citizens have a tendency to feel adrift with nothing to do -- or sometimes they're so active they want to try everything all at once.  The former often fall silent forever, while the latter often burn out in three months.  We can help both problems by offering new citizens manageable, important tasks that they can do.  This shouldn't just be an occasional solution: this should be a firm goal.

Citizen review of the law.  At regular intervals, citizens should be asked to read and interpret sections of the law.  Wherever it's unclear or hard to understand, the Ziu should be made aware.  It's not always something that can be fixed, since legal language must be held to a high standard to protect civil rights, but it's important information even if we can't resolve it.  The Bar can be asked to assign attorneys to produce explainers, for example.

The Progressive Alliance will cut administrative red tape and reduce bureaucracy, so no one's time is wasted and everyone's enthusiasm is valued.

HAHAHAHAHA you're just full on plagiarising old Free Democrat platforms now

Hold on... wait a second...

Are you telling me that other parties have promised to eliminate red tape and have a more efficient government in the past?


Yes indeedy!  We also plagiarized this from the 2024 party platforms of the both the United States Democratic Party and the Republican Party, plus probably the 2012, 2016, 2020 platforms for both.  Heck, this was also a TNC promise: I have pretty consistent beliefs! (https://wittenberg.talossa.com/index.php?topic=2037.0)  It's a pretty common promise.

More seriously, I personally was advocating skepticism when it comes to a new bill that wants to create a new bureaucracy, and one of my first questions was, "Do we really need a new bureaucracy?"  I think it makes sense to emphasize that this is principle is something we're serious about, and that we're going to go hard on.

Now if our goals align with others in Talossa, that's great.  We can work together ;)

No, no, that won't wash. Don't make me go through the old posts to find where, in response to the old FreeDem "cut green and red tape" promises, you waxed lyrical about eliminating "necessary safeguards" and "fine old laws which were fun to make and did no-one any harm".

I'm afraid you might just have to be dissatisfied with this one, although I did look up the discussion (read it here (https://wittenberg.talossa.com/index.php?topic=1212.msg9941#msg9941), lol).  I don't think we won your vote in 2022, either, even though I said much the same stuff:

Quote from: https://wittenberg.talossa.com/index.php?topic=2037.0For a long time, the Cabinet has been very big and has tended to have numerous positions that function as sinecures -- jobs that are given as rewards to loyalists, but without any expectations that anything will really happen.  Parties might come up with "check the box" busywork, but most often a Cabinet official will be expected to perform one or perhaps two tasks for their entire eight months in office.  And that ends up being one more thing for the Seneschal to manage, and one more person who they might need to chase around.

Simultaneously, you often get people with a lot of energy and interest who find that there's not much for them to do in their job.  They do some stuff, then spin their wheels as they search about for new projects.  They send out messages into a black hole of Cabinet discussion, and really it ends up being three or four people who do all of the discussing and make all of the decisions.

To be honest, I really thought you probably weren't going to vote for us, anyway.