by Sir Arthur Foulkes
No one expects the business of parliament to be conducted like a Sunday school. Parliament is where the laws governing the nation are made, where public policy is debated, where the collection of revenue and the expenditure of the people’s money are authorized and where the executive is held accountable for its conduct of the people’s business.
That is heady stuff and so it is expected that passions should flare up from time to time and that members will engage in sharp exchanges and even indulge in occasional dramatics to draw attention to their causes. In some parliaments members driven by personal animosities and ideological differences have resorted to fisticuffs.
That has not happened in our House of Assembly in recent memory although it was reported that many years ago Sir Etienne Dupuch and Walton Young exchanged blows in a committee room. Sir Etienne was a pugilist and it was said that Mr. Young got the worse of the exchange.
Years later, after an adjournment of the House, Sir Cecil Wallace Whitfield, then in opposition, intervened to stop a physical encounter between Sir Lynden Pindling and Sir Randol Fawkes. Sir Randol was no longer a member at the time but had jeered at Sir Lynden from his seat in the public gallery.
Our elected chamber is one of the most decorous in the world, perhaps because of its small size and its tradition of formality. Until 1956 members of the House (MHAs in those days) met in the evening and were attired in tuxedos or mess jackets.
The House shifted to morning meetings to avoid the kind of nighttime demonstrations that accompanied Sir Etienne’s anti-discrimination resolution which had provoked a very emotional debate and a confrontation with then Speaker Asa Pritchard.
Sir Asa was a strict disciplinarian but not everybody appreciated that. Etienne Dupuch II once depicted him in a cartoon as a tyrant in the chair cracking the whip over cowering members. Mr. Speaker was not amused.
Sir Asa preserved the decorum of the House and most of the time it took only a slightly inflected “Order!” to calm agitated members. During his term as Speaker House meetings started on time and you could set your watch as the black rod would announce his entrance into the chamber at precisely the appointed hour.
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Despite its very nature and the adversarial atmosphere in which most of its business is conducted, the decorum of parliament cannot be dispensed with altogether, and its rules -- although designed to be flexible -- cannot be consistently ignored and abused. Otherwise the public will lose respect for this foundational institution.
That is precisely the direction in which the House has for some time now been headed. What is particularly worrying is that it comes at a time when slackness seems to be growing as a national characteristic and when too many of our young people no longer find discipline, good manners and respect to be attractive.
These days, meetings of the House seldom, if ever, start on time, and that too is becoming a bad habit with most organized events in this country. Members of parliament should be setting a better example.
Opposition Leader Hubert Ingraham pointed out in the House last week that in spite of their huge majority the Government had difficulty mustering a quorum for each morning and afternoon session of the budget debate.
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Bahamians have been understandably worried about the occurrence of malaria in Exuma but it was wrong for Prime Minister Perry Christie to seize on this to grandstand at the expense of the rules and long-standing conventions of parliament and to attempt to make the opposition look like the bad guys for refusing to go along.
Mr. Christie knows that it is, and should continue to be, a rare honour for anyone who is not a member to address the House of Assembly in session. That is a privilege reserved for foreign heads of state and government and other distinguished persons. Even so, it must be with the unanimous consent of the members.
Under no circumstances should a Minister of Government who sits in the Senate be allowed to address the elected branch of parliament in session. But last week Mr. Christie proposed that Dr. Bernard Nottage, the Minister of Health who sits in the Senate, should do just that.
The opposition rightly withheld its consent but agreed to a compromise in which Dr. Nottage could address the House during an adjournment. Even that was unnecessary as there were many other ways in which this matter could have been handled, including a national broadcast on radio and television.
Yet, at the appointed time, the Prime Minister still raised the question and forced the opposition to state their objection publicly. He was supported in this piece of political chicanery by Tennyson Wells, an experienced parliamentarian, who urged members to leave politics out of it!
But Mr. Ingraham was protecting the rules of the House. It was Mr. Christie who was politicking. Mr. Christie also manipulated the system when he caused parliament to be prorogued so that newly-appointed Governor General Arthur Hanna could preside over an opening.
There was nothing wrong with this except that the House had not been prorogued in four years and it was doubtful that it would have been if a new governor general had not been appointed.
It was blindingly obvious what Mr. Christie was up to in the case of Dr. Nottage. The Minister, who until recently had been holding out as leader of the CDR, had gone back to the PLP and had been accepted with much fanfare. Now Mr. Christie wanted to showcase his latest acquisition by setting a new precedent, and he was prepared to destroy a parliamentary convention in the process.
One of the reasons Mr. Christie gave for wanting Dr. Nottage to address the House on the malaria affair was that he was a doctor. It was obvious that Dr. Nottage read his statement, a statement that could have been read by the Prime Minister himself or any other Minister of the Government in the House. Doctors do not necessarily read well.
There were no questions and answers afterwards, no discussion. If there had been, it would have made more sense for members to engage the Bahamian and international disease control experts who were sitting in the gallery and who had done a great service for the country.
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Incidentally, someone should instruct the reverend ministers of the gospel who are invited to be chaplains to the House that they should remain at the bar during the opening prayers and not walk onto the green carpet.
Only elected members of parliament, and the public officers who serve them, should go beyond the bar while the House is in session.
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Perhaps after the next election the Bahamian people will have a better crop of representatives who, if they are unfamiliar with the ways of parliament to begin with, will at least have the care and competence to educate themselves about the rules and conventions and to conduct themselves accordingly.
Any parliamentarian worth his salt welcomes some heckling and intervention. That can make for good debate. But constant interruptions and loud chatter are unfair to the member speaking, not to mention the persistent abuse of the rules governing points of order.
For the duration of this parliament, however, that is likely to continue since after four years the Speaker himself apparently has not grasped the difference between a simple intervention and a point of order.
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