And on the ninth day of the ninth month of the ninth year of the millennium, Juliette, Queen of the Northern Wastes of St Mary came unto the city, and spoke unto the wise men.

‘Dost thou want reform?’ she asked. ‘Yea, verily,’ they cried. ‘We thirst for reform.’
‘Then thou shalt have reform,’ she said, and brought forth stone tablets on which were inscribed many strange pictures and words.

Four of the wise men came forward with reform plans of their own, and together they all laboured for a day and a half, but they could not agree, because forsooth, the men were not wise (nor all men either) and the madness of all those nines bore heavy on their pointy little heads.

But when dawn broke the following day, a small boy from St Lawrence went before the wise men.

‘Umm… hi,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t it just be easier to move the Deputy elections to the same day as all the others?’

And lo, unburdened by the weight of all those scary nines, the wise men agreed. And it was good.

And that, it seems, is the function of Deputy John Le Fondré, who is of course the small boy of our parable.

He’s pulled this kind of thing before: you might remember the GST on food debate, when his proposal to boost Income Support instead of exempting food effectively turned the result by creating a half-way house between ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

The reform debate was pretty similar. His amendment to just move existing elections to the same day wasn’t as bold as removing Senators or Constables (or even as bold as removing GST from food), but it was a compromise, and it worked.

It didn’t satisfy anyone completely, it left a sour taste in the mouths of some – most notably Deputy Daniel Wimberley who saw conspiracy in the nodding heads – but at the end of the day it was the last, best option on the table.

And whether it really was the cosmological quirk of the main debate taking place on 09/09/09 or not, last week was a strange one. Not just because some reform arrived out of a reform debate, but because the mood in the States Chamber was altogether different.

When the debate began, it really looked as though Members were going to have a good go at working together to get through it.

Deputy Trevor Pitman gave – and you really must sit down to read this – a very reasonable, non-confrontational speech.

Deputy Roy Le Hérissier’s speech on the problems of reform debates was so good I didn’t even write any of it down – I just sat in the reporters’ box silently nodding my head and agreeing instead of banging on the table, snarling obscenities and begging the news editor to get me out of there. Not to labour the point, but that doesn’t happen often.

There were others: Senator Philip Ozouf, St Helier Constable Simon Crowcroft, St Clement Constable Len Norman, and Deputies Judy Martin and Montfort Tadier gave strong and insightful speeches, on the way to what looked like absolutely no progress – despite the repeated, nonsensical and bitter interjections of Grouville Constable Dan Murphy and the aforementioned Deputy Wimberley.

But the end result of the two days of debate is, of course, that there will be no ‘second bite of the cherry’ for candidates in the next elections for those who stand for one office, and then another. Six got in like that last time, and another five tried but lost out in both sets of elections – which confirms that the idea of using the Senatorials as a springboard to a Deputy seat has gotten around.

Here’s the rub: it won’t stop the Senatorial elections being a nightmare in 2011, and it won’t stop there being loads of candidates.

By my count, only one of the six Senators is a dead cert to stand again. At least three have definitely ruled themselves out, two are unlikely to have another go.

That means up to five empty seats, each of them worth over a quarter of a million pounds over six years. If the job market doesn’t improve by nomination day in September 2011, the ballot paper could be a long one.

There are, you may be surprised to learn, downsides to my job. One is sitting through reform debates. Another is trying to make sense of them.

A third is that most States Members are nice people (not all). Most of them are in the job for the right reasons (again, not all). Most are decent, honourable folk (OK, some of them).

It’s not a comfortable feeling having a pop at someone who’s nice, decent, honourable and well-motivated. It’s really not.

But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t say that since she was elected to the post of Health Minister in April, Deputy Anne Pryke has shown no evidence that she’s on top of the job.

The debacle of the Business Plan cuts where Health said they’d be stopping milk supplies to new mothers, shutting down a youth centre and ending the Patient Transport Service, then saying they wouldn’t, then saying they’d be cutting things like free sports injury clinics and water vending machines and cranking up crematorium fees was bad. Really bad.

Her performance in the debate on Friday about changing the terms of reference of the inquiry into the death of a nurse in 2006 was woeful, just reading from a prepared speech.

And now we learn that there are further funding pressures at Health which have prompted an extra cash injection for next year.

The Health Department has a proposed budget of at least £167m for 2010 – to put that into context, it’s around about what a GST rate of 10% per year would bring in. It’s huge. The minister in charge of that brief needs to be well on top of it.