Conflicting messages from legislators
It was very interesting that while the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Michael Peart, was concentrating last week on banning media access to more sections of Gordon House, members of the Senate felt that the media should be encouraging more people to attend sittings.
Leader of Opposition Business, Senator Anthony Johnson, first noted the empty public gallery at Friday’s sitting which debated the important Electoral Commission bill.
Senator Trevor Munroe (Government) also looked at the empty public gallery and associated himself with Senator Johnson’s remarks.
“I would like to suggest, however, that this is not only a result of public alienation, public concern with the growth of partisanship in our Parliament, and that certainly is one factor,” Munroe said. “But there is another factor, and that has to do with simple lack of information.
“To my great surprise, students at the tertiary level at the University of the West Indies, having passed through the primary, secondary levels, are quite unaware, in large numbers, that they have a right, if they so wish, to attend the Parliament,” he said. “Many of them will ask, what do they need? Do they need permission, do they need a ticket?”
Munroe felt the media could assist in making the public aware that they are welcome to attend. What he probably did not know is that both dailies had been carrying the schedule and agenda up to when they could get them by Friday evening.
Parliament has a website which never carries a schedule or agenda for the upcoming week.
Our understanding is that most of the seats in the public galleries on either side of the House, overlooking the members in the chamber, are to be removed and the area limited to police presence. A door is likely to be placed between Hansard and the Press gallery and journalists are being banned from the Hansard area which was actually once the province of a daily newspaper.
With the seating capacity for the public already less than 150, and with the increased police presence at sittings already taking up nearly half of those seats, the removal of more seats will certainly make it less attractive to the general public, much less students.
But even if 150 members of the public could be packed into that uncomfortable situation in Gordon House, there will still be approximately two-and-a-half million more Jamaicans who cannot attend sittings and would have to depend on the media to inform them about what happens inside.
So when the Speaker decides that he will further limit the access of the media to an already overcrowded Press gallery, how will that help the situation?
Probably these members who wish to improve the co-operation between the media and Parliament ought to have a talk with the Speaker and the Clerk to decide on what they really want.