Public Records Minister

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

Actually, this reduces the statutory ministries down to 3.  You should read the outline -- I think it's a pretty good new approach.

[Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC]

Actually, this reduces the statutory ministries down to 3.

It explicitly names 15 portfolios of ministerial responsibility, but keeps 12 of them within the Seneschalsqåb unless delegated. Since the Seneschal can *already* take on as many portfolios as they like (I think we've been calling this "stacking"), I'm not aware of a problem.

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

Yes; this would atomize those responsibilities to allow them to be more fluidly assigned according to the needs of the moment.  I think it would better reflect actual practice.

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

This is nowhere near a finished piece of legislation... it's a broad proposal asking for feedback.  The main feedback from the URL is that they're very opposed to the basic concept.  They like things the way they are.  I think my plan is a good idea for reform, though, and I'll work to convince our conservative friends across the aisle to support this step towards progress.

Right now, we have eleven ministries of various size and scope.  This means we always need to stack multiple jobs on a handful of people, since it's the best way to handle that situation (as we promised in our campaign).  But that system wasn't handed down from on high... the government should serve the people's needs!

Accordingly, my proposal would maintain just a few statutory ministers.  These would basically operate as before.  Otherwise, the list of necessary tasks would be divided up by government as needed among these few ministers or however many new ministers might be needed or wanted, and then publicly posted.

This has a lot of advantages.  For one, it would make it a little more likely to have specific people given just one or two tasks, increasing accountability when compared to the current system of general deputies.  This allows people with specific expertise but not much time, or who want to just do one bit of something, to contribute without a significant commitment.

Additionally, it means people are less likely to need to round out the Government with less active people, just for the look of it, and we won't need to have people with five Cabinet job titles all at the same time.

Now, this reform isn't do-or-die -- since it seems like we don't have the numbers for this right now, we can just keep doing things the traditional way.  But I do think it would improve things and better reflect the real needs of the government.  I hope to be able to change some minds on this in the future.