Editorial | Jamaica’s woozy Parliament

In his latest critique of the failings of Jamaica’s political leadership, Howard Mitchell highlighted the inefficiency, bordering on laziness, of the island’s Parliament, and questioned whether those who run the show made the best use of existing “democratic mechanisms and structures”.

“I am challenging you to consider whether our parliamentarians are able to do the job that they were elected to do, and are now being paid well to do,” the lawyer/businessman told his audience at Campion College’s Bishop Samuel Carter Lecture last week.

Mr Mitchell’s invitation was rhetorical. He supplied his answer.

At the start of the 2021-22 legislative year, Mr Mitchell said, the Government had 18 pieces of legislation on its agenda. It managed to finalise only three. Nine remained untouched. Work started on five but was not completed.

For 2022-23, the governor general’s Throne Speech on the administration’s policy and legislative agenda mentioned 40 bits of legislation. Mr Mitchell, a former president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica, and increasingly a biting good-governance advocate, would be surprised if the outcomes are better than previous year.

The Government will probably quibble over the statistics. Parliament does not, as a matter of course, publish statistics on its performance. They are not readily available on its website.

What is available on the site, listed under Acts of Parliament, suggests that six bills of legislation were passed in 2022 and 14 last year. If this is the extent of the primary laws approved by the House, the figure for 2022 was three more than Mr Mitchell noted. The outcome for 2023 was only 35 per cent of what the governor general projected.

NUMBER OF REGULATIONS NOT CLEAR

It is not clear what happened in this category last year, but the reports also suggest that the House approved 12 regulations in 2022, compared to two the year before.

In 2020, which is the last year f0r which there are listings, 25 resolutions and orders were approved, of which 64 per cent were disaster risk management orders relating to the COVID-19 restrictions.

Even if the authorities were to find a few bills that should be squeezed into the column for Acts of Parliament, it would change neither the premise nor the fundamental conclusion of Mr Mitchell’s argument: that Jamaica’s political establishment underperforms, and among the places where this shows is in Parliament.

Mr Mitchell is not the first to lament the little time, sparse effort, intellectual deficiency, and narcoleptic energy with which legislators go about the people’s business.

What is different is that parliamentarians cannot complain now of being too poorly paid to give more attention to their legislative work, given last year’s 224 per cent salary hike granted to members of parliament (MPs), who will from April earn J$14.2 million as against the J$4.36 million before the increase. Ministers will be paid J$22.87 million.

In the face of a public outcry, Prime Minister Andrew Holness placed a freeze on his own increase and scrambled to have Parliament work on a code of conduct and job description for MPs. One, long promised for ministers, was promulgated. The parliamentary committee given the task has been, to say the least, slow.

NO NEW JOB DESCRIPTION NEEDED

It does not, however, need a new job description for Parliament to be more efficient at passing laws and doing other things required from the legislature and the Government for the proper functioning of society. Neither does it require an expensive new Parliament building, as is often suggested is the case.

A website that allows stakeholders to track bills through their various stages, provides background information on the work of committees, and offers data about the performance of the legislature, does not need fancy offices. That can be done from any cubicle and hosted anywhere. What it needs is commitment to the ideal, which also means providing the resources for the effort.

Government officials across administrations have often blamed an insufficiency of legal draughtsmen for delays in crafting legislation. But that is not the entirety of the problem.

Too little time is afforded to debates. Bills are often rushed through without serious analysis and with little involvement by backbenchers.

That is a problem easily solved by party leaders empowering their members to participate in debates, and by Parliament meeting more often.

Jamaicans are lucky if the House sits more than 40 days a year for a few hours at a time. By comparison, in New Zealand, a country of around five million people, the parliament is scheduled to sit 84 times this year, for perhaps twice as many hours in each session as Jamaica.

The New Zealand schedule, established by a parliamentary committee in December each year, will be two weeks shorter than in 2023. However, there are two weeks set aside, in June and December, when the House will not sit, but committees will be able to hold all-day sessions to scrutinise the government’s financial operations and other areas of management. That will not derogate from sessional committee hearings throughout the year.

That is a parliament serious about the people’s business.