Last week, in commenting on the controversy that arose when the government sought to bulldoze three pieces of legislation (the Municipal and District Councils and Local Authorities (Amendment) Bill, the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (Amendment) Bill and the Anti-Terrorism and Terrorist Related Activities Bill) through the National Assembly at one sitting and the government’s response that the PPP/C’s regime had acted similarly, I concluded by suggesting that the current government and its supporters would do best to reference their behaviour against regional and international best practices rather than past PPP/C behaviour.
With this in mind, although I will be covering some fairly familiar ground, this week I will attempt to give a few examples to indicate what route the government could take to develop greater participation in the law-making process.
As we have seen with the pre-2011 elections regimes, under Westminster rules, governments, particularly those with a large majority, rarely have trouble passing the laws they want. This has led some to argue that Westminster-type systems are no more than elective dictatorships. Yet, if the intention is to broaden participation in the legislative process both outside and inside the formal system of law-making, there are impressive possibilities.
Firstly, laws are initiated by many actors e.g. governments, political parties, trade unions, business associations, NGOs, etc. Since the national parliament is the only legitimate authority to make rules with national reach and the government dominates the legislative process, to be
