Ms Sun Xueling
Blk 308B Punggol Walk
#01-364
Waterway Terraces 1
Singapore 822308
Dear Ms Sun,
Responsibilities of Member of Parliament
1. Quotes:
a) United Kingdom
The first duty of a member of Parliament is to do what he thinks in his faithful and disinterested judgement is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain. His second duty is to his constituents, of whom he is the representative but not the delegate. Burke's famous declaration on this subject is well known. It is only in the third place that his duty to party organization or programme takes rank. All these three loyalties should be observed, but there is no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy.
— Winston Churchill, Duties of a Member of Parliament (c.1954-1955)
b) Canada
The member of parliament represents his constituency through service in the House of Commons. This does not mean, however, that he spends most of this time sitting in the House, or even that attendance there is the most important part of his work. An MP spends far more of his working life outside the House than in it … . The job is people-oriented, involving talking about and listening to ideas, proposals, and complaints, reconciling opposing viewpoints, explaining party or government policy to citizens and citizens’ views to party and government, getting action out of the government on problems of constituents, and examining how the government uses or abuses the power it exercises on behalf of the people of Canada.
— Professor C.E.S. Franks
c) Singapore
SITTING OF PARLIAMENT
The Parliament of Singapore can meet at any time of the year. The date of the meeting or sitting can be specifically named by Parliament upon its adjournment or, if no date is fixed, called by the Speaker.
A notice for each sitting is sent to the Members of Parliament (MPs) who will in turn send in notices of questions that they wish to ask of the Ministers, amendments that they wish to propose to Bills already introduced or issues which they want to discuss at the forthcoming Parliament sitting. The items of business to be considered on the sitting day are printed in an Order Paper.
Parliament sittings usually begin at 1.30pm. The first one and a half hours are allocated for Question Time, where only questions listed on the Order Paper may be dealt with. As Question Time is limited to one and a half hours, outstanding questions at the end of Question Time will be dealt with as questions for written answer or postponed to a later sitting.
After Question Time, Parliament moves on to Ministerial Statements, if any, and this is usually followed by the introduction of Government Bills. In this part of the proceedings, the Ministers in charge of the respective Bills will introduce new Bills to Parliament. Any MP can also introduce a Bill in Parliament known as a Private Member's Bill.
Finally, Parliament will move on to the Orders of the Day and Notices of Motions, where it will review Bills that are set down for Second and Third Readings and debate Motions moved by MPs.
FUNCTIONS
The functions of Parliament include making laws, taking up a critical/inquisitorial role to check on the actions and policies of the Government and scrutinising the State's finances.
Critical/Inquisitorial
At the start of each Parliament sitting, one and a half hours are reserved for Question Time. This is a chance for MPs to raise questions with the Ministers on their respective Ministries' responsibilities.
Through questioning the Ministers, MPs make the Government accountable for its actions and allows the public to listen to a spectrum of views and opinions to find out how decisions affecting them are made.
This forms an integral part of Parliament's role. Questions may be filed by any MP who can seek either oral or written replies from Ministers.
MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT
MPs act as a bridge between the community and the Government by ensuring that the concerns of their constituents are heard in Parliament.
2. The complaints are noise from neighbour, sale of flat, CPF Account and CPF LIFE. It is a series of complaints that involved officers protecting the neighbour, preventing proper sale of our flat and causing mistakes in my CPF Account and CPF LIFE. Most of the details can be found in my blog from 28 Dec 18, which is the date of my letter Government Departments (10). As for the evidence, I had submitted all documents from the time of the complaint in 2007 at Meet-the-People Session, Ang Mo Kio.
3. I have kept at it for many years because there is injustice. Anyone can see for themselves from the letters I wrote to the MPs. I also wrote and spoke to officers. No one has showed me I was mistaken. Why then is the issues not taken up?
4. To explain, there is a concept known as credulity defined in the article below:
Debunking debunked
Animal magnetism was a way of formalising a common human capacity for suspending judgment and playing along in the name of social bonds. I use the term credulity for that capacity because I want to draw attention to the fact that our commitment to secular agency, and to the activities of debunking that secular agency implies, can often misrecognise this capacity as belief. It isn’t belief, not really; it’s neither believing or disbelieving, but bonding through the construction of a shared story. Debunkers often dismiss such bonding as credulity in the bad sense – as excessive belief. Animal magnetism is an opportunity to ask what baby is getting thrown out with this bathwater.
What then is debunking? It can be a necessary way of setting the record straight. I’m by no means opposed to truth-telling. We need fact-checkers. The more highly placed the con artist, the more his or her deceptions matter. In such cases, it makes sense to insist on hewing to the truth, and it might not be very important that, in so doing, we are setting aside a significant dimension of what it means to be human: the dimension of credulity as I am defining it here.
https://aeon.co/essays/is-debunking-more-about-the-truth-teller-than-the-truth
5. We are a democracy and parliament can deal with the problem. The way forward has always been through debate and reasoning. The responsibilities of Member of Parliament (MP) are quoted at 1c).
6. If MP does not give me a reply, then I will not know whether my concerns are being addressed by Parliament.
Yours Sincerely,
hh
cc
Mr Lee Hsien Loong
Mr Heng Swee Keat
Mr Teo Chee Hean
No comments:
Post a Comment