It's official: Parliament does not mean what it says [1]
Sunday, May 18, 2014 - 17:45. Updated on Friday, May 23, 2014 - 12:51.
From the House, By Pesi Fonua
The verbatim reporting of the proceedings of the Tongan Parliament does not interpret accurately the meaning of what has been said in parliament, according to Gloria Pole'o, the Clerk of the Tonga Legislative Assembly.
Gloria was trying to clarify the fact that even though it was spelled out in the Parliamentary Minute No. 4 of 31 March that the House had debated and rejected the Annual Report of the Electoral Boundaries Commission (EBC), that was not actually what the House was doing. She said that the document that was rejected by parliament on 31 March was not the Annual Report of the EBC.
Gloria said that when the Chairman of the Whole House Committee announced to the House on 31 March that the committee was going to debate on the ‘Annual Report of the Electoral Boundaries Commission’, what he really meant was that they were going to debate on a report, but not the Annual Report of the EBC.
She said that she knew and the Chairman knew what he was talking about. "You have to be in parliament to understand that, and I was," she said on Friday May 16.
But why had no one corrected the Chairman so that what he said conveyed exactly what he meant? Shouldn't the members and the public know exactly what the House was debating and voting on?
Gloria queried why was it that I was the only one who interpreted the meaning literally: why did I think that the words “Annual Report of the Electoral Boundaries Commission” meant that they were debating the “Annual Report of the Electoral Boundaries Commission”?
What?
Unfortunately, if what is reported in the Minutes of the Tonga Legislative Assembly, the official report of the proceedings in parliament, means something else other than what has been said in parliament then it leaves us wondering if we really know what is going on in parliament?
It must be noted that two days later on April 2 in the Legislature, an accumulated 2010-2014 Annual Report of the Electoral Boundaries Commission that was presented to the Speaker on 31 March, had its first reading in Legislature and it was passed 17-0.
For argument's sake, this report on April 2 did not have a second or a third reading in the Legislature, the normal procedure for any reports or Bills that are presented to parliament.
Therefore if the April 2 presentation was the real “Annual Report of the Electoral Boundaries Commission”, and because it did not have three readings, we are once again forced to conclude that the House did not pass an Annual Report of the Electoral Boundaries Commission during the final sitting of the Tongan Parliament 2013 Parliamentary Session from 24 March to 2 April.