Every week, we ask an MHK to write for us. This week it's Douglas North MHK David Ashford.

General election campaigns all around the world are events always filled with buzz words and phrases and here on our island is no different.

One of the perennial political phrases that is a guaranteed word bingo winner is ’diversify the economy’.

A nice simple phrase to put out there that suggests as a candidate you are looking to the future and want to see stable economic growth. But behind that phrase there has to be substance and it is not just a simple matter of encouraging new businesses to the island, it is something that requires changes across government policy to achieve and it is something that this administration must get right if the vision for our island laid out in the administration’s Island Plan is to be achieved.

For instance, you encourage new businesses into the island such as those in the green economy, great, all well and good, but where are those businesses going to get their staff from?

As an island we have an unemployment rate of 0.7% (1.7% if you use ILO estimates), which is the lowest rate since June 2003.

So if you are going to encourage new business you need to be able to encourage people to come to the island with the appropriate skills for those sectors. But it doesn’t stop there, if you are going to encourage people into the island there has to be a reason for them to come.

The people you are after are working age (obviously!) and likely to have young families.

You need to ensure they have housing they can access at an affordable rate and provide the environment they want for their families - appropriate schools, health care system and transport links so they can visit the family they leave behind.

Without all of that being in sync that great broad political slogan and cry of ’diversify the economy’ just will not work.

That is why one of the immediate challenges for this administration is to ensure that government is working as one organisation.

That departments are working together and also accepting that government can’t deliver everything and both the private sector and third sector have skills that government just can’t replicate.

I’ve deliberately avoided that well trodden phrase of ’single legal entity’ (another for the word bingo!) which seems over the years to have filled some politicians with enthusiasm and left others complaining the world as we know it is coming to an end. It runs deeper than that.

If this or any administration is to succeed, then government needs to ensure it is responsive to the needs of society as a whole and that can only be achieved if government is working as one to achieve those aims.

Former US President Ronald Regan once said: ’The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and here to help.’

Over the next five years we all collectively need to ensure that we have one government that is a help not a hindrance.

In the Examiner on Tuesday (January 25), read Clare Barber's column.