Morten Wetland

Morten Wetland (born 12 May 1951) is a Norwegian lobbyist, jurist, diplomat and politician for the Labour Party. He is a former State Secretary, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Norway to the United Nations in New York.

Wetland graduated from the University of Oslo with the cand.jur. degree in 1976. He was hired in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the same year, but left to work as a deputy judge in Grimstad from 1978 to 1979. From 1983 to 1983 he worked as a secretary at the Norwegian embassy in West Germany.

He then returned to Norway to work as a civil servant. He worked in the Norwegian Office of the Prime Minister from 1985 to 1990, except for a period between 1989 and 1990 when he worked as director of the legal department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1991 he was promoted to deputy under-secretary of State (ekspedisjonssjef) in the Office of the Prime Minister. In 1992 Wetland was responsible for coining the phrase Det er typisk norsk å være god, which translates to "It is typical for Norwegians to be clever". The phrase was used in a New Year's speech by then-Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, and quickly became famous in Norway.

In 1994 Wetland moved from the administrative to the partisan political stratum in the Office of the Prime Minister, as he was appointed State Secretary in the third cabinet Brundtland. He lost this job when Gro Harlem Brundtland resigned in 1996. In the new cabinet Jagland, he was appointed State Secretary in the Ministry of Industry and Trade, but only lasted for less than two months, from 1 November to 18 December 1996.

...
Wikipedia