Editorial | Free the PAAC

This newspaper is sympathetic to Mikael Phillips over the difficulties he says he encounters in convening meetings of Parliament’s Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC).

Hopefully, those problems are not a ruse by government members of the PAAC to achieve, via the backdoor, what the administration first attempted in 2018 and mostly accomplished two years later: wresting parliamentary committee chairmanships away from opposition members of parliament (MPs) and handing them to government legislators. That was, and remains, bad for transparency and good governance and, therefore, democracy.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness should, in the circumstance, cause the parliamentary whip to be extended to the 11 government MPs who sit on the 14-member PAAC, insisting on their regular attendance at its meetings.

The PAAC is one of two parliamentary committees chaired by opposition members. The other is the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

In the old days, all parliamentary committees, with the exception of the PAC – which reviews reports tabled by the auditor general (AuG) – were chaired by members of the majority party. That, however, changed during the 2007-2011 premiership of Bruce Golding, Mr Holness’ predecessor as leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).

When the JLP lost the government, the practice was continued by Portia Simpson Miller’s 2012-2016 administration – and, initially, by Mr Holness after the defeat of Ms Simpson Miller’s People’s National Party (PNP) in 2016. However, two years into his term, Mr Holness’ administration attempted to claw back all the chairmanships – except for the PAC’s, the leader of which is defined in Parliament’s Standing Orders. The Government retreated in the face of a public outcry.

EMBARRASSING THE GOVERNMENT

When the JLP was re-elected in 2020, the administration pushed through its 2018 plan, arguing, as it had done at the time of the previous grab, that committees that deal with matters of policy should be in the hands of government members. It also claimed that under the old arrangement, the committees were inefficient, which many people construed to mean that they focused on too many issues that embarrassed the Government.

That may not have been an illegitimate concern. But as Mr Golding noted during the administration’s 2018 move: “There is, of course, the possibility that the Opposition chairman will use his/her position to embarrass the Government, but such is the thrust and interplay of a parliamentary democracy. It is the responsibility of the Government to seek to ensure that there is nothing about which it can be embarrassed. That is what checks and balances are about.”

Unlike the PAC, which generally convenes when reports from the AuG are tabled, the PAAC has the right of almost real-time reviews of the activities of ministries, agencies and departments.

However, Mr Phillips, the committee’s chairman, says he has a hard time scheduling meetings. The rules, to which there seems a demand for rigid adherence, require that a majority of members agree on a date and time for meetings. Government members, Mr Phillips complains, often fail to respond to advisories, or do so too late to schedule public officials for sessions.

This newspaper’s reporting shows that since 2020 the PAAC has met 38 times, nearly a quarter of which (nine, or 24 per cent) were mandatory sessions to review the Government’s annual Budgets or Supplementary Estimates. By contrast, it met 101 times during the four years of the Simpson Miller administration and 86 times during Mr Holness’ first full term – 2016-2020.

BIG SALARY INCREASE TO DO THEIR JOBS

Mr Phillips has threatened not to convene or chair meetings on the Budget or Supplementary Estimates unless the situation improves. We hope it does not come to that, causing a halt to, or disruption of, matters to which the country has to attend.

But neither should a chairman of a serious committee of the legislature have to, as it is suggested he should, coax and inveigle members, who recently received big salary increases, to do their jobs. Or make themselves available to do it.

The anecdotal evidence suggests that this laziness, wilful neglect, or contrived constraint is not limited to the PAAC. Other committees now chaired by government members cannot claim to have covered themselves with glory, even if they were able to claim marginally better performance numbers than in the past.

It is not good enough to blame an insufficiency of parliamentary resources for their tardiness. Not with the salaries that MPs now receive.