A Secret Govt Think Tank

Journalists have been able to piece together from as many as six different Official Information Act (OIA) requests, secret Government plans to establish a new Think Tank. The ‘piecing together’ is required as of course, all information provided against OIA requests needs to be heavily redacted to keep everything top-secret.

Through a painstaking process, unredacted snippets of communications between Ministers have been assembled which provide as ‘clear as possible’ insight into the inner workings of the current NZ Government and allowed the journalists to extract key aspects of the plan, as follows.

Firstly on Imperatives:

“..we’ve got less than two years before the next election, by which time we will have been in charge for six years, and need to find something we can actually deliver before then..”

“.. the Public Service is hopeless – literally the more people we appoint, the worse it gets. Everyone has to learn Te Reo, and the Waiata Lady is over-taxed and needs to run everywhere nowadays and everything is running late as no meeting can start without a Waiata being sung..”

On Methodology:

“.. it’s fascinating the saying that ‘give 1,000 monkeys a 1,000 typewriters for a 1,000 years, and they will create the complete works of Shakespeare. It’s something to do with The Science or The Statistics, or such but I wasn’t much chop at science or statistics..”

“.. hmm.. So that would mean that if we had 500,000 monkeys and 500,000 word-processors we might actually achieve something in as little as two years. Phone Grant for the money and let’s just do it!”

Some of the Details:

“..you need to be careful about which species of monkeys you choose, as some can be ‘difficult’. I’ve checked on Wikipedia and figure that ‘Laborious Ardernis’ are suitable, and they’re plentiful too.”

“..they’re not too bright, and can be a bit ‘nippy’, but are okay in extremely small doses”

Progress so Far:

“..the monkeys were ordered a few months ago and are in fact on a ship sitting outside the Port of Auckland, awaiting whatever ships parked in that area wait for..”

“.. we’ll call the Think Tank ’Department of Monkeys’..”

The plan has run into a few ‘minor’ snags:

“..we need to check the vaccination status of those monkeys, and get them in the lottery for some MIQ slots ASAP..”

“..we need to figure the main name of the department in Te Reo. There’s no Maori word for monkeys as there were none here before the colonialist scum arrived, unlike Taniwha, for example..”

“..has anyone ordered the computers? What about office space for the monkeys? Where they will live? What do they eat anyway? What’s their carbon footprint?”

This is surely a fascinating story and more OIA requests have been submitted. Watch this space!