I write this article in full cognisance that I may be flayed for my opinions. What I’m going to write here does not adhere to popular assessment. The accepted view says that when we elect MPs, they should attend every sitting of the Parliament, or Dewan Rakyat to be more accurate. At least, a vast majority of them should be there and not elsewhere.

 

This issue has cropped up a couple of times before.

In December last year, Pakatan Rakyat called for bloc voting thrice in its attempts to stall the Prevention of Crime Act (PCA) bill when it was being passed around midnight.

The opposition coalition averaged about 60 MPs voting against the bill for every vote. They had, back then, 89 MPs.

 

Earlier this week, they called for a bloc voting late in the evening to try and thwart the Finance Ministry budget under the federal budget for 2015, and had 34 MPs voting against the bill. Now, they have 87 elected MPs who could have voted. More than half were absent.

 

I’ve had friends ferociously fuming at the fact that the Pakatan MPs are not doing their job because they are not in attendance. What else is so important that they can’t attend?

 

Well, for one, I can tell that the Bagan MP and Gombak MP both have states to run. One is the Penang Chief Minister, and the other, the new Selangor Menteri Besar. If they attend Parliament everyday, which is four days a week in session, they’d be accused of not doing their jobs as CM and MBs.

 

Attendance not a benchmark

Of course, there are also many others who are at their respective constituents, and some doing early legs of silent campaigning in southern or east Malaysian states in an effort to spread their reach well before GE14.

 

When GE comes and these Pakatan MPs are unable to make inroads in the less glamorous constituencies, the people also point fingers at the political leaders to say they should have started making inroads well before GE and not have waited until it happens to do so.

 

As unpopular as it may be, Parliamentary attendance can no longer be the yardstick as to how well a parliamentarian is performing, especially one from Pakatan Rakyat.

 

Unless there is some serious reform of parliamentary procedures, parliamentary attendance will become a secondary concern.

 

Parliamentary reform has been peddled by several MPs before, but in the noise of everyday politics, this issue is being seriously drowned out.

 

Parliament is supposed to be the highest legislative institution in this country, but its reform is not getting the kind of attention that it should.

 

Few people seem to have realised that attendance across the board in Parliament has been on the low side for quite some time now, that the amount of sitting days per annum has been steadily dwindling since 2008, that the questions being raised in debates are being negated, and the entire system is becoming just another red tape to stop MPs from getting the answers they want.

 

Question time

The space to keep the government accountable is dwindling, and unless there are calls for parliamentary reform in the same vein that people have called for electoral reform, this space might just continue to shrink.

 

Parliament starts with question time every morning for some 90 minutes. A swift look through the order paper will show that the relatively difficult questions are placed much lower in the order paper.

 

That is because on average, about eight questions are answered orally (which allows for supplementary questions and grilling towards the minister), while the rest are answered in writing, in which there is no space to ask for further elaboration.

 

More than once, the answer will not even be in full. The government and ministries play around with semantics to answer questions without answering. This is the information the people have to make do with.

 

Under the name of lesser sitting days and lesser amount of time, MPs are rushed through their debate speeches. Half of their speech will be interrupted by other MPs who are, at times, asking inane questions, contributing nothing to the debate or to legislative policy.

 

Ministers and deputy ministers sometimes waive off questions as being “irrelevant”, based on “assumption”, or in the case of Deputy Finance Minister Chua Tee Yong recently, he blatantly refused to even entertain questions. Despite debating for about ten minutes and even heckling the minister, the MPs rarely get the information they seek.

 

This also forces ministers into making apparent mistakes, but in my experience of attending Parliament sittings as a journalist for the past 30 months, never had a minister been reprimanded for the errors he or she made. A ministerial “explanation” often suffices when faced with an accusation of “misleading” the House.

 

Emergency motion

 

One of the standing orders in Parliament allows a motion to be urgently listed in the order paper if one-third of the MPs sign it, but even then, under the name of prioritising government affairs, such motions are not even read out in the House.

 

Similarly, emergency motions are shot down using the same excuses.

 

Probably, the only difference BN’s non-existence of a two-third majority in Parliament has made is the fact that it is unable to make amendments to the Federal Constitution, including approving drastic electoral changes.

The rest of the bills still gets bulldozed through, as the PCA bill so blatantly demonstrated.

 

The only recourse seems to be that abrupt calling for bloc voting. No matter how low the attendance is, the government can rely on its host of ministers and deputy ministers who are not in the House per se but are around the House having meetings or handling their ministry affairs.

 

At the ring of the bell, they are able to ramp up the numbers which can still defeat Pakatan in the event of a vote.

 

A minimum quorum in Parliament, after all, only requires the attendance of 26 members – just over 10 percent of the 222 parliamentarians.

 

Given sittings run from 10am in the morning and sometimes until 9.30 pm – even later at times, it is utterly unrealistic to expect MPs to be present throughout on a 12-hour shift.

 

Realistically, most of them plan their timing and come to collect answers to questions they had asked, or depending on the minister who is about to take the floor.

 

Shadow cabinet

 

This is where the importance of a shadow cabinet and a formal recognition for such a cabinet becomes so pertinent.

 

An MP who talks about all issues – from illegal logging to fiduciary regulations – is a jack of all trades and master of none. The quality MPs whom I had the privilege of meeting and knowing over the years are those who have their own areas of expertise.

 

In an ideal shadow cabinet environment, their input will be taken by the relevant ministries that they engage even if they are from the opposing bench.

 

And at committee stage, which is the stage the House currently sits in as it goes to the final weeks of approving the 2015 Budget, the House will be divided into smaller committees.

 

This is so that only those who are well-versed in finance sits in the committees for the Finance Ministry and so on.

 

This is a long way from happening in Malaysia. Calls for there to be a Prime Minister’s question time so that the PM could personally come to Parliament and answer questions had also fallen on deaf ears.

 

Except for that occasional question time appearance, which is brief and fleeting in nature, the PM never faces the kind of grilling his deputies and his fellow cabinet members face in the House.

 

No House in the entire world sits with full attendance at all times. Its attendance must depend on the issue being discussed. Unless there are smaller committees, we are continuing to allow backbencher hecklers like Bung Mokhtar Radin and others interrupt and pour mud on any pristine debate.

 

An expensive necessity

 

In the midst of all this, budgetary concerns seems to also be a factor. Each Parliament sitting day is not cheap. The stipend to be paid to MPs from constituencies outside Kuala Lumpur to attend the sitting costs the government money. The security apparatus adds to the expenditure.

 

Of course, we should never equate budgetary concerns with Parliament. Parliament is a necessity, no matter how expensive it is.

 

But the fact that the amount of sitting days has dwindled from an average of 70 to 80 days per year to just 50 to 60 days per year in the past three years indicate that budget might be a factor.

 

When things are rushed within the constraint of time, debates lack quality, answers lack conviction, and sittings stretched to midnight for the sake of passing bills without going through the finer details, with very little space left for other things that are not on the government agenda to be discussed.

 

And when time is limited, the gravity of attendance becomes a naught. It is nothing more than a rubber stamp. But what are we doing about it?

 

The Parliament should not be about government agenda alone. But when time is limited, there’s only one side ever setting the agenda.

 

One of the primary estates of this nation-building process is ailing. We talk about the judiciary and the election often enough. When will we start talking about the Parliament?