Pandemonium in Parliament

Soon after Papua New Guinea got its independence from Australia, the Speaker of the National Parliament pleaded with members to preserve the decorum of the House by refraining from attending dressed in cowboy boots and hat.

This gave rise, elsewhere to many unfair jokes on the lines of ‘and while you are about it, please desist from eating the other members’. This notwithstanding, it illustrates the Commonwealth convention that Parliamentary decorum should be maintained.

Around the same time, the then Speaker of Sri Lanka’s National State Assembly Stanley Tillekeratne asked Member of Parliament Ronnie de Mel to leave the Chamber as he was improperly dressed - he had left the top button of his tunic undone! He duly did so, returning fully buttoned.

Un-parliamentary language

Those were halcyon days, in which the Chair had merely to admonish members on their manner of garment or on their un-parliamentary language for them to desist. Members behaved decorously - more so even than in the ‘Mother of All Parliaments’ at Westminster.

The most radical members of the House, the Leftists, kept well within the bounds of parliamentary precedent, being experts on procedure - they had Sir Thomas Erskine May’s ‘Treatise on the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament’ dripping out of their ears. Marxist and University English Professor Doric de Souza, a Senator in the 1960s, was once asked by the Speaker of the Senate to withdraw a particular un-parliamentary expression. He modified the offending term to ‘poppycock’, which was allowed. Protests generally took the form of members leaving the Chamber, although members were also known to rise in unison and call out about points of order and matters of privilege. The cut and thrust of debate was lacking in rancour or verbal violence.

Manhandle members

Nowadays, one expects that the Speaker himself may have to take on the job of the Sergeant at Arms and manhandle members out of the House. This was vividly revealed to the public on budget day, when the unruly behaviour of some of their representatives was aired on television.

The President, as the chief representative of the people; the Speaker, as the supreme embodiment of the assembly of the people’s representatives; and thereby the people themselves, were insulted. It matters little who was responsible; there is a general deterioration in norms.

If there is a moment, the cusp at which one could pinpoint the start of the breakdown of behaviour in Parliament, it would have to be July 1977. The United National Party’s landslide victory at the polls threw up a new set of politicians who were unruly by the standards of the time. It became customary for the government members to heckle Opposition speakers, setting up an unassailable barrage of noise, rather like the ‘wall of sound’ used around the same time as a musical device by the pop super-group ABBA.

The late Wijeyananda Dahanayake (a member of the UNP himself) advised the new, rather small cohort of Opposition MPs who were elected in the ‘mini-election’ of 1983 to speak in English to prevent themselves being drowned out by the din from the government benches.

Political upheaval

According to former Prime Minister Dahanayake, the bulk of the members of the ruling party could not understand English, hence they had no idea when to jeer and to hoot. It worked. However, this was not a question of social class.

The political upheaval of 1956 threw up many politicians from the subaltern classes, for example Senator DG William, a proletarian who worked his way up from waiter at the Galle Face Hotel to head of the Hotel Workers’ Union. However, they behaved very correctly in Parliament.

The difference was one in attitude. After 1977, for the first time, politicians began to see themselves as rulers, rather than servants, of the people. The neo-liberal ideology of the UNP also put power and money, rather than erudition or honour, on a pedestal. The times were rife with such aberrations as the constitution being changed at a whim (with eleven amendments within nine years), two members sitting for the same single-member constituency and former Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike being deprived of her civic rights.

Expression of opinion

In this atmosphere, the then government relied on its steamroller majority, always accompanied by the cacophony of the wall of sound from its benches, to drown out the Opposition. It is questionable whether Erskine May would have approved.

The democratic expression of opinion was eschewed for the tactics of the gallery; point of order was replaced by taunt and slur, question of privilege by boo and barracking. Language rode the un-parliamentary boundary precariously.

Unfortunately, the end of the 17-year rule by the UNP did not put a complete end to this. When the late KB Ratnayake was the Speaker in the first Parliament after the UNP defeat, he had regularly to request members to mind their language because schoolchildren were present in the gallery.

Where formerly, such statements as ‘My friend, the member for so-and-so, is mistaken’ were tantamount to insults, today it is not unheard of to refer to fellow members as quadrupeds of various bovine and equine species - and at a volume which must surely churn the turbid waters of the Diyawanna river.

With all fairness, it should be mentioned that there is a downward trend in the behaviour of legislators worldwide. Members of the Papua New Guinea National Parliament were reported last year to have been trading death threats.

In the ‘Mother of all Parliaments’ itself, the Speaker in June asked Prime Minister David Cameron to withdraw the accusation that Opposition Leader Ed Miliband had ‘misled’ the Commons, which he refused. The thin end of the wedge.

Speaker Chamal Rajapaksa’s announcement of an inquiry into the sordid incident on budget day will be welcomed by the public and will, it is to be hoped, begin the process of returning Parliament to its former glorious and serene state.