Urgency

You wouldn’t know that there is a new parliament in place if it weren’t for the activities of the one man who did not win a seat: Wycliffe Smith, leader of the extra-parliamentary Christian Party.

Since the elections, Smith has produced no less than thirteen opinion pieces to the print media. They drop into our mailbox regular like clockwork once a week. The fifteen elected Members of Parliament have been utterly silent since they were installed last October, making many voters wonder what these people are getting paid for. They are getting a bigger bang for their buck from Smith, a man who isn’t even on the voters’ payroll.

Parliament’s inactivity was supposed to come to an end this week – after the Inter-Parliamentary Kingdom consultation (Ipko) in Curacao but so far we haven’t been made aware of any meeting of this esteemed body.

It is about time to start doing at least something. The labor legislation has been at the parliament since December 2 of last year and it is supposedly one of the first topics parliament will deal with.

One may well wonder, after years of (unsubstantiated) complaints about the abuse of short term labor contracts, what happened to the urgency?