Who is popular today?

AS Parliament grows more accommodating, with most of its committees being chaired by government Members of Parliament (MPs), members were positive about its performance up to the end of the 2021/22 session.Leader of Opposition Business Anthony Hylton (St Andrew Western) approved the announcement of a huge increase in committee meetings, as well as a record 77.3 per cent attendance recorded for sittings during the year."In the spirit in which you have expressed this wish to get the productivity of the House of Representatives up, and to get the standards and to do more for the Jamaican people...the Opposition is with you," Hylton said.He said with the increase in the number of meetings and the level of attendance, he expects there will be improvements in their quality and output."The Opposition, in carrying on its role,will be vigorous as well to ensure that the processes for getting things done are observed, and the rulings of the Speaker will also help to get more things done," Hylton added.He was responding to information produced by Leader of the House of Representatives Edmund Bartlett, which included the disclosure about the 77.3 per cent increase in attendance.He announced that there had been 66 meetings of the House in 2021/22 and 182 meetings of the sessional, select and joint select committees, as 26 Bills were approved during the period.Bartlett brought to the members attention, as the House adjourned after its first meeting for 2022/23 on Thursday afternoon, that it was the first time he could recall having a meeting after the Throne Speech for anything other than renaming committees and tabling the budget book for the incoming fiscal year.He commended the staff of the Houses of Parliament, including the newly promoted clerk, Valrie Curtis, and Hansard (stenographers) for their cooperation, as well as the chairmen and members of the various committees."The robustness of activities in the House [during the past year] has put them under stress to deliver their reports, and I want to tell them that we have taken note of this and [that improved) technology is on its way to assist them," the House Leader said."We are advancing new technology which will enable them to capture, by voice, all deliberations of this House and for them to be recorded and reproduced almost simultaneously," he announced.He said that Parliament was closing the 2021/22 session, "recognising that we gave full opportunity, not just for the appropriation budget to be fully examined clause by clause and line by line, but also for robust debate which ensued on both sides of the House, and then we went into the sectoral debate"."Finally, we have brought in a new dimension to the extent to which members of this honourable House [not only] represent their constituency in the traditional sense of banging on the desks and singing 'Aye, aye, aye', but [are] be able to present the case of the constituency for the attention of the executive so as to include budget considerations," Bartlett noted."It really starts with us as leaders setting the examples and abiding by those examples. It starts with us, in the House, saying that we are going to be punctual, we are going to follow the rules, and we are going to be civil with each other. Once we start to set those rules and abide by them and become exemplary, then you will start to see the transformation of the society," he predicted.Prime Minister Andrew Holness also chipped in at the start of his presentation on the extended COVID-19 protocols, noting that the output from Parliament has been increased relative to the passing parliamentary year."The public is looking on at the Parliament as an indication of the general productivity of the entire country," he implored."The way in which we arrange our business, how we conduct the affairs of the Parliament, should never be fixed. We should always be reviewing the way in which we engineer our processes."We have started to do that moving from simple things such as the starting time [for meetings]. Simple things such as ensuring that we are about to read statements and we have copies...How we speak to each other across the aisles, how we relate to the Speaker," he said."We can be forceful without being offensive, and we can be assertive without being disrespectful. We ought to review how we conduct ourselves," the prime minister added.In 2007, then Prime Minister Bruce Golding decided to hand over chairmanship of all parliamentary committees to members of the Opposition. However his successor, Holness, as leader of the ruling Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), decided in 2020 - after being re-elected for his third term - to retain the economy and production, internal and external affairs, human resource and social development and infrastructure and physical development committees.Only the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and the Public Administration and Appropriation Committee (PAAC) have remained constantly under Opposition chairmanship.