PARLIAMENTARY REFORM

The call for Parliamentary Reform by Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr Barendra Sinanan, in which he recommended having Parliament sit more frequently, as well as the curtailment of the speaking time of MPs should be examined objectively by both Government and Opposition.  Mr Sinanan advanced the thinking during the discussion on time management at Wednesday’s Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference at the Hilton Trinidad. The increase in the number of sittings will provide the Government with a greater opportunity not only to have all of its Bills debated fully but to have greater backbencher participation in Parliamentary debates. In addition, it will give Opposition members who, deferring to senior members of their Party,  contribute infrequently to debates, the chance to put across points on issues in which they may have a special interest.

At the same time their constituents have an opportunity to better assess their worth. The increased number of sittings will allow for the presentation and debate of more Private Members’ Bills, and less reason for the Government of the day to encroach on the time of Opposition Members of Parliament, with the plea that other and more pressing matters need to be discussed. Meanwhile, the proposal to have the speaking time of MPs reduced from its present clearly generous 75 minutes, if accepted, will require Parliamentarians, on both the Government side and that of the Opposition to do more research on relevant subject matters, in order to be more concise in their presentations.

Already, the Barbados Speaker, Mr Ishmael Roett, in his contribution at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference, advised that in the Barbados Parliament the speaking time was 30 minutes, while a Canadian Parliamentarian, Dr Robert Marleau, pointed out that in the Canadian Parliament the allowed period was 20 minutes! Most of the members of our Parliament talk too much and frequently seem to have no idea about what they are speaking. What is crucial to House Speaker Sinanan’s recommendation is that it will encourage, provided of course that it is accepted, a somewhat more productive use of Parliament’s time.  All too often there has been the perception that some Members of Parliament literally play to the gallery in an effort to gain the attention of both the print and electronic media and so reach a wider audience than the physical size of the Parliament Chamber affords.

Clearly, any Parliamentarian, who has studied a Bill or public issue carefully should be able to come to a sitting of the House prepared to represent his/her views on the matter being debated without being needlessly verbose. Unfortunately, there are no publicly known statistics on the numbers of hours that the House of Representatives conducted its business, or more correctly the people’s business on an annual basis, say over the past five years.  It would have been instructive to have compared these figures, for example, with those published several years ago in the work, Parliaments of the World by Macmillan.  The United Kingdom’s House of Commons was at the top of the list with an average annual figure of 1,528 hours, closely followed by the United States’ Senate of 1,146 hours.  The German Bundestag had a modest 313. 

While the number of hours spent debating the country’s business in Parliament should not be the only guide to an MP’s contribution, as much is done in the work of Select Committees of the House as well as meeting with and attending to the work of constituents. However, meeting once a week  in Parliament, or more during the Debate on the Budget and critically important Bills cannot be seen as enough, and moreso as the Speaker of the House, Mr Sinanan’s recommendation has forced many citizens to think anew, though admittedly some for the first time, on the question of Parliamentary Reform. Above all let’s limit the time MPs bore us to death with totally irrelevant talk and both sides are guilty of this.