A few weeks ago, a furore arose over the regime’s stated intention to push three pieces of legislation (the Municipal and District Councils and Local Authorities (Amendment) Bill, the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (Amendment) Bill and the Anti-Terrorism and Terrorist Related Activities Bill) through parliament at one sitting.
The criticisms were sufficiently fierce, relevant and broad-based for the government to back down on the Anti-Terrorism and Terrorist Related Activities Bill to consult further. The opposition PPP/C clearly had strong ground to argue that parliamentarians should be given sufficient time to study and consider all intended parliamentary matters and that all major and/or complex bills should be sent to a special select committee.
In putting the case for the PPP/C, I believe that Ms. Gail Teixeira was correct in pointing out that after the Final Report of the Special Select Committee on the Needs Assessment of the Guyana National Assembly, in 2006 the Standing Orders were amended to prevent, except in an emergency, bills being taken through all their stages on a single day, and that even before this the Parliamentary Management Committee had agreed that all ‘major and/or complex bills’ would be sent to a special select committee.
It appears to me that the government faces two ‘structural’ problems that it needs to recognise and solve. One has to do with how we have learnt to frame our political behaviour and the other with the nature of the legislative process itself.
Firstly, Ms. Teixeira made a very good case for a timely and deliberative process, but she over-played her hand when she attempted to claim that ‘since 2006 with the new Standing Orders, the PPP/C government abided by these rules and parliamentary conventions and norms’.
In `The PPP disassociating from its ‘glorious’ past’ (SN 23/4/14), I had occasion to direct Mr. Narindra Persaud and now point Ms Teixeira to the Stabroek News August 2008 report about a heated quarrel which took place when the PPP/C regime sought to suspend the usual parliamentary vacation to rush through five pieces of legislation that the leader of the opposition thought needed ‘in depth analysis, widespread consultation and profound consideration before we could reasonably respond to their thrust, import and intent’, and to the March 2010 report that in the face of the opposition’s demand for more time, the government used its majority to pass the contentious Court of Appeal (Amendment) Bill.
Of course, Mr. Persaud was attempting some classic PPP/C propaganda. The PPP/C stance was that the feistier National Assembly it was facing after it lost its majority in the 2011 general elections was unreasonable and obstructive and Mr. Persaud was trying to convince us that when the PPP/C was in control of the House it was the epitome of reasonableness!
But Ms. Teixeira’s obvious lapse of memory is of only passing importance and it is upon the government that we need to focus. Its response (which reportedly came from Minister Raphael Trotman) to criticisms that it was behaving in an unparliamentary manner was that it did not break the rules: ‘government is acting within the Standing Orders and the Constitution’.
I repeat my usual point that democratic parliamentary behaviour is not strictly about laws; it should be about working cooperatively and openly and putting heads and ideas together for the national good. Actually, so much of governance depends upon value judgments (what is an emergency situation, for example) that if one does not come to its administration with the requisite democratic value commitments, one is bound to run afoul of the process.
The problem appears to be that we automatically assess the bulk of our political behaviour against the historical PNC and PPP ‘bad–governance’ regimes. I have found that it takes a deliberate effort to relinquish this particular mindset.
Secondly, in my time in the National Assembly, the legislative process was an issue in which I took some interest. Not long after the PPP/C came to government in 1992, a copy of the ‘The Parliamentarian’, the quarterly journal of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, was presented to all parliamentarians. In it was an article dealing with the passage of legislation through the Westminster parliamentary-type system, in which the purpose of the various stages in the process was detailed.
From that time, whenever occasion arose, I would advocate that adequate time be given and that large bills be sent to committee stage. In about 1994, the Cheddi Jagan PPP/C decided that bills of more than about six pages in length should be taken to committee.
The following is intended as an indication of the troublesome nature of a more deliberative process and to counter those who may want to speculate that I may now be giving advice that I did not myself take.
I was a social sector minister in the PPP/C government from 1992 to 2006 and had the opportunity to initiate some substantial legislation, including the Domestic Violence Act, 1996; Trade Union Recognition Act, 1997; Occupational Health and Safety Act, 1997; Termination of Employment and Severance Pay Act, 1997; Prevention of Discrimination Act, 1997; The Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation Order, 1999; the Medical Practitioners (Amendment) Act, 2001; National Accreditation Act, 2004 and Technical and Vocational Education Act, 2004.
All of the Bills had been sent to stakeholders and been the subject of negotiation, often years before the drafting was completed, and the vast majority went to the parliamentary committee stage. Some of this can be gleaned from the dates of the legislation, particularly those relating to labour, regarding which, notwithstanding years’ long discussions a deliberate and concerted effort still had to be made to get them passed before the end of the PPP/C’s first term in office.
The lengthy deliberations and negotiations at various stages of the legislative process are fatiguing and time consuming when compared to taking a bill through all its stages at one sitting. Thus, the 2006 decision was not very popular with ministers and where possible was avoided.
Thus, it appears to me that to deal with the problem of political framing, individually and collectively the government needs to make a special effort to reference its behaviour against relevant regional and international best practices. Additionally, if it intends to make the National Assembly more open and deliberative it will have to hold a strong line against ministers who may wish to circumvent the legislative process.
henryjeffrey@yahoo.com
