We recently spoke to Adele Brown from Maritime New Zealand about her involvement with G-REG Core Knowledge and how it is aiding her in her compliance work.
What do you do at Maritime NZ?
I’m the team administrator for the Intelligence and Planning team in Compliance. Before that, I was the office manager for a cyber crime team in the police.
Where are you up to with G-REG?
I’m doing number four (Regulatory Compliance Activities) of Core Knowledge. The last one was really hard I thought because it’s legal and I’m not a legal person. But it was really interesting.
What do you find interesting about it?
Learning how government works, how central government and local governments work. It relates to real life as well, not just work. I like this stuff, that’s why when I left the police I knew I’d have to join the government.
Day to day, is it helping you at all?
I find it really helpful because I’ve had to hit the ground running and have had to train myself in lots of areas and get on with the job. So, while I’m getting on with the job and learning lots of new things, I might not be learning about the actual organisation and what we do. It’s like working in accounts in a restaurant, when all you see are the accounts and you might see the menus but you don’t see how the cook presents it; all you know is that it’s a restaurant, and people eat there some times.
So, that’s what I thought about this job. I didn’t know everything that we did, even though I had researched it on the internet for the job interview. What Maritime NZ does is a lot bigger than I thought!
G-REG has actually broadened what I know and see. It’s made me understand a lot more why we have investigators and what they’re looking for – I don’t understand everything yet. There are regulations that ships have to pass in health and certification; I don’t even dare go there as there’s so much to learn. I didn’t know there were so many issues on ships. Now I can see why they’re all talking about it. It’s amazing for me.
What clicked for you?
I think it was the compliance modules because they were about investigations, but the legal one was really interesting and that helped, because from our process investigations could go to legal, depending on what they’re going to do; whether it’s going to court or issuing infringement notices or something like that. I now know that it doesn’t just stop with us!
