HOA walkout by opposition solved nothing

Premier Dr Natalio Wheatley has argued that the political opposition’s move to walk out of the House of Assembly (HOA) proceedings last week solved nothing.

He accused them of attempting to paint his government in a bad light.

The six elected members of the opposition walked out of the House of Assembly last week after the Dr Wheatley-led government relegated their scheduled question-and-answer segment to the end of the sitting.

“If democracy is truly as important as we’re making it, we would be present and do and ask the questions on behalf of the constituents, rather than being absent from the House of Assembly,” Premier Wheatley said. “That solves nothing. All that is, is grandstanding. All that is, is trying to score political points and trying to make the government look bad and that’s not what I’m here for.”

Premier Wheatley insisted there was no real unfairness in the movement of the opposition’s questions to the end of the agenda as they had claimed and said democracy remained intact.

“This is not a partisan issue, and it does not mean that democracy has all of a sudden collapsed because the order paper was reordered. It is not that we were taking the questions off of the order paper. It was just being placed after public business,” the Premier said.

He explained that public officers, who protested the volume of the opposition’s questions and requested additional time to help ministers respond to them, even protested the issue to the Deputy Governor, who has oversight of the public service.

“I felt a level of compassion for those officers who expressed they needed more time, because I counted the questions, and there were somewhere around 150 questions that public officers just had a few days to be able to answer questions to,” Premier Wheatley told lawmakers.