Response of the day: Tan Chuan-Jin reminds MPs of rules after PSP NCMP’s Facebook rant

Speaker Tan Chuan-Jin on Mar 7 reminded members on how Parliamentary proceeding works and why observing guillotine time is important. This after Progress Singapore Party’s Leong Mun Wai posted on Facebook saying that the Speaker didn’t give him the chance to speak, adding: “Completely ridiculous”. This is an excerpt of his speech.

“I understand and made aware that Mr Leong Mun Wai had also posted on Facebook. I won’t repeat everything but he made a comment about: ‘I have a number of clarifications to make but the Speaker didn’t even give me the chance.’ Also he added: ‘Completely ridiculous.’

I’m sure members understand how the process works. I’m not here to speculate the intent and purpose of various members’ postings, but I thought it was opportune for me to refresh everyone’s memories about how this ought to work, and why.

Now, members are aware that all of you would submit cuts. And the formula of how it works is this: 40 per cent of the time comprises your cuts, 50 per cent of the time would comprise response time from the ministries, and 10 per cent of the time allocated for clarifications.

All of you are aware of that. I believe we also do have reminders sent out to all of you…

… Another point to add I think just so that you understand the thinking behind how I, for example, call on various members. I would like to give opportunities for various members from various parties to be able to speak. Different members have opportunities to speak at other time. So we’d like to give the airtime to different members as well. And I keep track of it because I write everything down to ensure that, you know, and I tried to roughly allocate that across the space of the whole COS and the Budget and this includes during normal PQ (Parliamentary Questions) and SQ (Supplementary Questions) considerations as well.”