Parliamentary Services Bill should be ready for tabling

 

From Hafiz Hassan

I read with interest K. Parkaran’s “Will the Dewan be an august house in September?”

The Parliamentary Services Bill should have been ready to be tabled for some time now. Two previous governments under two different prime ministers have said that such a Bill was ready.

Such a Bill was already conceived as early as January 2020, if not earlier, by the Pakatan Harapan government. Ten months later, the Perikatan Nasional government, through its de facto law minister, also said that such a Bill was ready.

The former was announced by then deputy speaker Nga Kor Ming. In an interview with Oriental Daily, Nga said the Bill would allow the legislature to be removed from the Prime Minister’s Department and, to a large extent, lead to a separation of powers as Parliament becomes an independent entity. If passed, the Act would also allow Parliament to have its own budget and hire staff, whose rights were repealed in 1993.

Already much-anticipated since restoring the dignity of Parliament was Promise No. 16 in the PH Manifesto 2018 that the Bill would have been “the mother of all Parliament reforms for the March sitting”.

But it wasn’t to be when the mother of all political moves – the Sheraton Move – oversaw the ousting of the elected PH government.

If the change of government would put to end the mother of all Parliament reforms, it didn’t look that way. Much to the credit of the PN government though, then de facto law minister Takiyuddin Hassan was reported in November 2020 to have said that the Parliamentary Services Bill was ready.

“The draft of the Parliamentary Services Bill has been prepared. The government is fine-tuning and reviewing the establishment of the Parliament Services Commission,” said Takiyuddin in a parliamentary reply.

Takiyuddin was responding to a question from Nga himself, who asked when the Bill would be tabled for the first reading in the Dewan Rakyat. Takiyuddin did not indicate any date.

So, Takiyuddin’s successor, Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar, should not need to say on Friday that he would submit to the Cabinet a report on proposals to modernise Malaysia’s Parliament, with one of the proposals being the tabling of the Parliamentary Services Bill “to give independence to Parliament”.

The current government is but the same PN government.

As such, the Parliamentary Services Bill should be ready to be tabled in the Dewan Rakyat. If any fine-tuning is needed, it is suggested that the drafters look at the main objects of the legislation, namely that it should:

• Establish a non‑partisan Parliamentary Service that is efficient and effective in serving both Houses of Parliament;
• Provide a legal framework for the effective and fair employment, management and leadership of Parliamentary Service employees;
• Define the powers and responsibilities of every Parliamentary Service employee; and
• Establish rights and obligations of every Parliamentary Service employee. - FMT

Hafiz Hassan is an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.