Honesty is the best policy? Not if you're a politician with a contentious report

admitted appalling mistakes for which no one appears to be responsible, States Members managed to wrap up a sitting in less than five hours, and the Economic Development Minister invented an entirely new kind of spin.

And I’m not joking about that last bit either … but we should, I suppose, be grateful that the man responsible for economic development and diversification is thinking outside the box.

Last week, Senator Alan Maclean had a problem. The retail framework report – and let’s pause for a second here and reflect that the word ‘framework’ appears to have become part of the public sector dictionary in the same vague way as ‘fundamental’ and ‘facilitate’ – that contained some interesting observations on the idea of a third supermarket had leaked. And it created a bit of a splash. And something of a smell, too.

The report tackles an interesting question: ‘Would the lower prices caused by more competition in the food market justify the damage to existing operators and the swallowing up of an out-of-town site?’ And it says, well, yes.

The problem was that the report was a bit too honest. It said that the minister felt a new supermarket was essential, that an ‘edge of town or semi-rural location’ would be needed, but that the consumer price drop would justify the use of a non-built-up site.

And then, for reasons passing understanding, the department gave a draft of the report to the people who had most to lose from its recommendations – the Chamber of Commerce. The people whose prices would be undercut by the new operator. The people who would be laying off workers and shutting down when they lost trade. The people who can’t compete with a major UK chain on prices.

This, it turns out, may have been unwise.

The fragile souls at Chamber were outraged, outraged I say, at the idea of building in a semi-rural location. ‘What about the red squirrels?’ they presumably cried. Or something. Anyway, before too long the report found its way into the pages of the JEP, and things started to kick off.

Enter Senator Maclean. A leaked report? A hostile reception? A debate ended before it had begun? What’s a minister to do?

He simply reached for the black marker pen and put a line through the Gordian knot. The precise language went vague, and the hard facts went soft.

And so a third supermarket went from ‘essential’ to ‘something we won’t try and stop’, and a line about a ‘semi-rural site’ being necessary just vanished entirely, to be replaced by expanded wittering on the subject of a ‘sequential test’. A line about the absence of sites in town disappeared as well, leaving a hint hanging that maybe, just maybe, we could do this in an urban area. Which, by the way we can’t. If someone could have, they would have.

So it’s the same report, but now the conclusions mean, well, pretty much anything really.

Funny that, because ‘pretty much anything’ is what you could have safely bet on the ultimate response of the Health, Education and Home Affairs ministers to last week’s Serious Case Review that pointed to awful failings at Social

Services, the police and Education being that no one’s really to blame.

Apparently it took quite a bit to even get the word ‘sorry’ out of the ministers, which just blows the mind really considering that the review uncovered missed opportunities over 13 years that various agencies could have taken to stop horrendous abuse and neglect within a family.

But you could just have dusted off Health Minister Anne Pryke’s script from the old Verita inquiry earlier this year – ‘no witch-hunt’, ‘blame game culture’, ‘won’t apportion individual blame’.

It’s an attitude that misses the point entirely. If something has gone wrong, then someone is responsible. If you’re at the top of an organisation and you

really don’t know who it was, then it’s you.

And when things go seriously wrong, then the public need and deserve a bit of proof that the services that they pay an enormous amount of money for are being run properly beyond bland assurances that lessons are being learned.

The possibility of getting anything but those kinds of assurances from Deputy Pryke appears increasingly distant, but we don’t need Education Minister James Reed and Home Affairs Minister Ian Le Marquand picking up bad habits.

Cheer up, there’s progress to report. Progress of a dramatic and striking nature.

Last week’s States sitting finished by 3.30 pm and I’m hoping that this could be the start of an exciting new trend. They got through their questions, got through a statement and polished off the debates in sharp time.

And we even got a new contender for quote of the year. Deputy Paul Le Claire started the ball rolling in 2010 with a belter: ‘States used to be supreme when I came here. Now it is more like chicken supreme.’

I know. It’s awesome. But he’s been beaten. Last week Deputy Daniel Wimberley came out with ‘we’re being offered half a banana on the end of a fishing rod’.