Chow Kon Yeow: 曹观友

The current Parliament session ends tonight. We are still rushing through three more bills and five government motions. We may end our day only after 9 pm.

It has been a long session, 35 days in all. The session started with the official opening and Royal Address on 13 March. Next, on 31 March, the Prime Minister tabled the Ninth Malaysian Plan. The Supplementary Budget followed suit. The final week focused on the many outstanding bills, two of which received much public attention, namely the two Water bills. By the end of today’s sitting, six other bills would have been passed. There are: Patents Amendment Bill 2006, Road Transport Amendment Bill, Akademi Seni Budaya dan Warisan Kebangsaan Bill, National Skills Development Bill 2006, Food Amendment Bill and the Malaysian Health Promotion Board Bill 2006. A few other bills have been withdrawn for the next sesion.

During this period, thousands of oral and written questions were answered.
Outside Parliament, two Select Committees were kept busy trying to complete their report. The Committee on the Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Code managed to complete their report today and the debate would be brought forward to the next meeting.

At the end of the 35-day session, how do I feel?

If I can, I just think all of us should be concerned about the question of ” integrity and conscience”. From the beautiful heavenly promises of the Ninth Malaysain Plan, Pak Lah ended up at the deep end of the gutter when he told BN MPs to toe the line. No room for conscience whatsoever in the BN scheme of things.

How do you feel, my fellow Malaysians?

The last business for the current session of Parliament is to adopt a Special Report of the Standing Orders Committee.

As provided in Article 62 (1) of the Federal Constitution, each House of Parliament shall regulate its own procedure and each House has made rules contained in Standing Orders.

The duty of the Standing Orders Committee is to consider and review the practices and procedures of the House generally and make recommendations for their improvement or change for the development of new procedures.

I am a member of the committee. One meeting was held on 3.6.2005 and a list of not so important amendments was proposed by the Speaker who chairs this committee. The committee knocked out some really trivial amendments. In short, the House is asked to adopt a few major changes; for example, extending the daily Question Time to 90 minutes, extending the number of days allocated for debates for the Budget and Supplementary Budget.Another is to refer a MP to the Privileges Committee for making misleading statement in the House.

The DAP submitted a memorandum to the former Speaker but nothing came out of it. Standard Orders is a tool to control the running and proceedings of House and the current government would be the last to open up.

Most of our proposals are not adopted and it is good to look at the memorandum again. (more…)