Lee: Govt did not want to compromise

Government's inability to compromise on the Sunset Clause of the anti-gang legislation was the tipping point for the Opposition which forced them to vote “no” to the bill yesterday in the House, Opposition Chief Whip David Lee said.

“We were willing to accept and vote for the bill but there needed to be some legislative amendments. We always maintained that even when we brought it (in 2011) it wasn’t effective. We tried (to work with them),” Lee claimed. The sunset clause is a part of the legislation which causes it to “expire” and allow for a new bill to come before Parliament to debate the efficacy of the law. This clause was included in the initial legislation.

“We had included the Sunset Clause because we knew it was a trial. When it expired last year, everyone was saying the bill had been ineffective. If it didn’t work then, I can’t see what (the new bill) was expected to do,” Lee said. The anti-gang bill debate started at 10 am on Wednesday and ended close to 2 am yesterday.

Lee said the spirit of the debate had been one of camaraderie so he believed that in committee stage, negotiations should have been easy. He said the Opposition was willing to allow tweaks and modernization to the bill. Regarding the Sunset Clause, he added that if the new bill had proved to be effective, when the time came to vote again, perhaps the Opposition would have voted to remove the clause altogether and leave the bill as law.

The Opposition had wanted the Sunset Clause to be two years, and the government countered with five years. “I don’t think (our request) was unreasonable. This should not have been a deal breaker,” Lee said.

He said the government needed to explain how effective this new piece of legislation would be, adding that since Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi had only introduced the bill on December 1, and demanded a vote when the House of Representatives reconvened on Wednesday, it didn’t give the Opposition enough time to examine the bill properly. The Opposition, he said, would have accommodated an extension.

The Opposition also had concerns with the sedition clause, which the government agreed to remove and another which would have allowed the police to enter a dwelling house without a warrant if there was enough evidence to support a suspicion.

“We got one out of three. And the sedition clause was so aggressive I think they made it like that so they could say they gave us one,” Lee said.