Editorial | Reset House committees

When the new Parliament convenes soon, in the aftermath of this week’s general election, this newspaper looks forward to Prime Minister Andrew Holness moving quickly to repair an error of his last administration.

He must return the chairmanship of parliamentary committees to Opposition members of the House and instruct his Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) legislators to robustly participate in, rather than frustrate, the work of the committees.

Such a move will be good for Parliament’s oversight of the executive and contribute to lifting the quality of governance, especially on the context of Prime Minister Holness’ Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) winning a third consecutive term in government and the PM’s warning to the team to avoid arrogance, which is a real danger of power and the longevity thereof.

Currently, the Standing Orders, Parliament’s rule book, legislates the chairmanship of three of the 13 standing committees: the Standing Order Committee and the Committee of Privileges, which are to be headed the Speaker, and the House Committee, which deals with the physical conveniences and comforts of the legislature, which is chaired by the Leader of the House.

However, it is a long-standing convention that the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), and the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC) are chaired by Opposition members. The PAC which reviews reports by the auditor general as well as financial statements by public bodies, while the PAAC’s responsibility is the real-time oversight of expenditures of government ministries and departments.

However, parliamentary Opposition chairmanship was extended to the other committees during the 2007-2011 administration of Bruce Golding, Dr Holness’ predecessor as leader of the JLP. It continued during the Portia Simpson’s People’s National Party (PNP) administration (2012-2016), but began to fall under stress after the Dr Holness’ JLP returned to office in 2016.

REVERSAL OF ARRANGEMENT

Two years into Dr Holness’ administration, his party’s usual parliamentary stalking house, Everald Warmington, called for the reversal of the arrangement. In the face of an outcry by civil society organisations the government retreated, until it was raised again months later, in October, 2019, by the then Leader of the House, Karl Samuda.

The government, Mr Samuda said at the time, felt “strongly that committees that deal with policies of the government members ought properly to be chaired by government members”. Public outcry again caused a halt.

Among those who disagreed with the government’s intention was Mr Golding, the JLP’s former leader. He gave short shrift to the administration’s concern that the Opposition use their positions at the helm of the committee to make the government look bad.

“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,” Mr Golding wrote in this newspaper. “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.”

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the matter. After the 2020 general election, in which the JLP won in a landslide, with 78 per cent of Parliament’s 63 seats, Dr Holness ignored suggestions that he maintain the convention and entrench it in the Standing Orders.

The Opposition, the prime minister complained, spent most of their time on the PAAC and the PAC, presumably where the most juicy embarrassing issues were likely to emerge, and almost none on the other committees. That, he argued, was to the detriment of a broader oversight of government, including review of policies from the administration might gain advantage.

AVOID EMBARRASSMENT

First, as we did when he first made them, this newspaper agrees with Mr Golding’s 2018 observations about the likely posture of Opposition parties and legislators in the “interplay of democracy” and how governments ought to conduct themselves to avoid embarrassment.

Indeed, government chairmanship of the committees, other than the PAC and the PAAC, has done little to enhance, as Dr Holness claimed it would, the oversight of the executive. The committees have been largely stagnant. Their meetings, when held, generally fail to get to the substance of issues, becoming, mostly, chorus lines in praise of policy.

At the same time, the Opposition chairmen of the PAC and the PAAC often complained of an inability to find quorums for sessions because, they claimed, of deliberate actions of government members, who enjoyed a weighted majority on the committees.

A significantly reduced majority in Parliament might cause the government, instinctively believe that maintaining control of the committees is to its tactical advantage. We disagree.

With its five-seat buffer, the administration has a clearly workable majority. In any event, in its third consecutive term, but faced with a festering mistrust of the majority of voters (only 39.5 per cent voted in the election) for the political class, the government should bend towards greater transparency and accountability. And as Bruce Golding advised, do nothing that will cause it embarrassment.