IPOH, Nov 23 — The Perak Opposition Leader will receive an additional one hour to debate in the upcoming state legislative assembly, Speaker Datuk Ngeh Khoo Ham said today.
He said the debating time was increased to an hour from 40 minutes.
“But now we are giving the Opposition leader another one hour to debate. So in total the Opposition leader will have two hours. This is to elevate the Opposition,” he told reporters at the State Secretariat Building here.
“The first one hour is when the state assembly starts and the second slot will come after the excos present the oral answers. This is to allow the Opposition leader to give his view, criticism or conclusion of the answer given by the excos,” he added.
Ngeh said they will also maintain the 30-minute time period for each assemblyman to deliver their speeches.
“After we had increased the 20 minutes time to 30 minutes in the previous state assembly meeting, we found that the given time is sufficient for the assemblymen to talk about local issues,” he added.
Ngeh also said the state assembly has requested help from the police to conduct body scanning on all assemblymen to make sure they surrender their firearms before entering the state assembly.
“Most of the assemblymen have a license to own a pistol and they would be carrying it around for their safety. We don’t want them to mistakenly bring the weapon to the state assembly. They have to surrender it to the police.
“At the moment, we don’t have the scanning equipment in Parliament. So we need the police to conduct the scanning manually using the scanning device,” he added.
Ngeh said that the upcoming state assembly from November 27 to December 5 is important as the state budget for the year 2019 will be tabled.
