Wyatt Roy, the youngest person elected to the Australian Parliament at age 20, was the first Assistant Minister for Innovation, but not according to his Afiniti profile page.
In life, honesty is very important and valuable. It builds trust, it builds your reputation, and if you’re a parliamentarian, it helps you get re-elected.
Unfortunately for Wyatt Roy, now the general manager of Australia and New Zealand for global firm Afiniti, which “transforms the way humans interact by applying artificial intelligence to discover, predict and affect patterns of interpersonal behaviour”, his own profile page misrepresents his achievements in Australian politics.
Roy’s own Twitter page describes him as “@afiniti Managing Director – Australia. Proud Queenslander! Former Member of Federal Parliament & Assistant Minister for Innovation.”
{loadposition alex08}Yet his Afiniti "team" profile page lists the following (and more): “Wyatt served in the Australian House of Representatives and as Australia’s first Minister for Innovation. At age 20, he was the youngest person elected to the Australian Parliament; at 25, he was the youngest Minister in the history of the Commonwealth.”
Someone in Philip K Dick’s famed "Adjustment Bureau" seems to have slightly adjusted Roy’s Afiniti profile to make his already impressive achievements even more impressive, but why?
An innocent mistake or a deliberate adjustment of the truth?
Wikipedia points to a Courier Mail article confirming Roy’s Assistant Minister for Innovation status at the time.
Whatever the reason, I have tweeted Wyatt Roy seeking an answer, as you can see below, but there is no response as yet.
.@MrWyattR, why does your https://t.co/JHDEtHbFmt misrepresent you as being "Australia’s first Minister for Innovation" when that's false?
— Alex Zaharov-Reutt (@alexonline888) May 12, 2017
Ultimately, it’s only a little thing, and can easily be fixed with the insertion of the word ‘Assistant’.
Do I ultimately care how Wyatt Roy chooses to represent himself to the world, when his lack of loyalty to his former prime minister Tony Abbott is already public knowledge and old news from 2015?
No. I just thought it was an interesting thing to see, and in a free world, to report.
Now you know, too, and what you do with this tiny and ultimately inconsequential tidbit of knowledge is completely up to you.
