Parliamentary Question Time - How the PAP perverts real democracy

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

This is a basic procedural flaw with the Singapore democratic process and yet no oppo parties have brought this up. How the PAP fucked around with and change the system, and meekly allowed to do so by the general populace is short of scandalous. No other truly democratic country allows this.

How the system currently works is that MPs submit a notices of questions they wish to ask the Ministers. Only one and a half hour is of a Parliamentary session is devoted to answering these questions. This time is so precious to oppo MPs that the questions they submit have to be home run questions, not whether teachers should pay for their parking in school or not. But what gives the PAP the right to change the parliamentary process this way. In fact, 4 hours of question and answer is not even enough time.

In the recent case where Leon Perera asked about the punishment the MOH staff received for the HEP scandal, he said the Minister declined to answer his questions on the grounds of not wanting to create a culture of blame. In the first place, all such information has to be made public. Why? These information are not the private privileged information of the PAP. Therefore they cannot be guarded as proprietary information. These information are from the public institutions like MOH which are funded and created by the people. These sort of information should be open and available to all political parties, news media, or members of the public through a request for information protocol. In other words, all political parties should have access to the same information, at the same time, from all public and govt agencies. The PAP does not have the right to be the sole exclusive distributor of this information.

In the case of Leon Perera, he should have been able to file a request for information and get the names and exact punishment meted out to all the staff involved in the HEP outbreak. In democratic countries, oppo parties would have the access to such information, studied it with their own experts, and then confront and raise points in a debate in a parliamentary session. In other words, Leon should have been debating with the PAP members how what happened, what steps are going to be taken, parameters of the COI, etc. Instead of still asking the basic questions of who was involved and what happened to them.

This is not real democracy. Anyone should be able to go to MINDEF and get the total number of SAF deaths and serious injuries in the form of a statistical spreadsheet broken down year by year. This does not mean the public needs to know where the incidents happened, what were the names of the dead, or what unit they belong to or even how they died. That part is still secret. Every army in the world that belongs to a democratic country reveals all this information to the public. Such revelation results in open debates in those countries.

I wonder if the oppo parties are too lazy or if they just never thought to go the source and request information that they want to bring up. And then file fully researched and analysed questions for the Ministers to either a) Answer with their balls in their throats or B) lie and make themselves look like idiots.


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