In the Passage of the House of Representatives, the large hall where petitions are presented to politicians every day, there is a group of excited forest rangers. “Dion Graus just said that we have presented the most original petition ever!” one of the rangers shouts at me. She stopped me to put silent disco headphones on my head.
The silent disco headphones are part of the petition: when you put them on you hear all kinds of people saying that they wish the earth well. The forest rangers are putting away the headphones: the petition is ready. Dion Graus (PVV), wearing his inseparable tinted glasses, is already listening to another petition further away.
At the top of the House, the first jaws of the day quickly dropped during question time. Joost Eerdmans (JA21) has read ‘with open mouth’ the proposal from the Dutch Bank to oblige people to invest their savings in making their homes more sustainable, and he wants to know from State Secretary Alexandra van Huffelen (D66) whether she will report that. also read with open mouth’. And, part two of his question: ‘Does the Secretary of State intend to embrace the proposal?’
That’s a strange question; If Van Huffelen had read the proposal with her mouth open, she certainly had no intention of embracing it, and if she did embrace it, she would not have read it with her mouth open. Anyway. Van Huffelen gives a long answer, which she concludes with: ‘In short: the obligation is not yet there.’
After all, it is only a proposal. But Joost Eerdmans still wants to continue. He finds the proposal ‘creepy’, and he already knows, he says, where Dutch people’s savings would end up if they had to put it in their house: in ‘the green grab bag’.
He does not explain what the green grab bag is. But a little later the green grab bag comes along again, when Eerdmans says that if you make your house more sustainable, you will never earn that money back. “It will be in Mr. Jetten’s green grab bag,” he knows. So if you put a solar panel on your roof, the money you pay for it ends up in the green grab bag, and that green grab bag belongs to Rob Jetten?
‘You’re never going to earn that money back. That has been extensively documented’, says Eerdmans. ‘In short: what do you mean profitable?’ When Van Huffelen seems to interpret his question rhetorically, and there is a long silence, Eerdmans quickly says: ‘Period.’ And then he adds a punctuation mark of his own accord: ‘Yes, Chairman, I also put a question mark there.’
Esmah Lahlah (GL/PvdA) also has a question for State Secretary Eric van der Burg (VVD). Her question is about the fact that the ICT systems at the Public Prosecution Service are ‘downright bad’. For example, prosecutors are often unable to put a digital signature on a warrant, or to send and open emails.
According to Van der Burg, a lot of attention has been paid recently to ‘what I call the mother system’, which is confusingly called GPS. And as a result, too little attention was paid to standard packages, ‘such as Outlook’.
Outlook? Isn’t that just email? Isn’t that what every student with a laptop has? How complicated is it to get that in order? ‘Officers have to log in via their email,’ says Van der Burg, ‘and that doesn’t happen to some extent.’
So these really seem to be banal problems. Lilian Helder of BBB wants to know exactly what the ‘digital rescue unit’ will do, which has now been set up to save the public prosecutors from their faltering systems. She quotes the intranet of the Public Prosecution Service, on which the task force is bombastically announced: ‘Then it says: The task is to give users perspective on the instability of office automation. My question is: what does that mean in plain Dutch?’ Eric van der Burg: ‘That they cannot access their email and their agenda.’
