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Julius “Tries A Thing” In House of Reps
posted (July 31, 2013)
Next Wednesday, there will be a sitting of the House of Representatives. The business of this meeting has not been released as yet, but if the Opposition gets an opportunity they would like to table a motion on the Public Accounts Committee.

The motion is the brainchild of People's United Party member Julius Espat, the P-A-C's chairman. Viewers may know very well that this is the only committee chaired by an Opposition member, and, for years, it has not been effective at its duty of looking into the expenditure of public funds.

And to fix that, Chairman Espat wants to change the configuration of the committee which currently has 4 members of Government and 2 members from the Opposition. He wants to see it changed to 2 members of the Government, 2 members of the Opposition, and 3 members from the Senate, one from the church, the business community, and the Unions.

This new configuration of 7, according to Espat, will allow the PAC to do its job more effectively because according to him, the ruling administration of the day has too much influence over it.

The idea is to take away oversight from both political parties because, according to him, it does not represent true democracy, because the Government Ministers cannot truly investigate themselves properly.

He told us that he has made all the prerequisite steps to get this motion tabled before the House, and that it now rests with the Government to see if it will actually make it on to the order of business for the house meeting.

Today, 7News attempted to contact Prime Minister Dean Barrow to get his impressions on this proposed motion, but we did not get any response.

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