Acting on acting appointees

IT IS understandable that the Prime Minister wishes to change the law to allow the Police Service Commission (PSC) to appoint acting top cops without reference to Parliament.

It seems tedious to convene the House solely to make an appointment which will last a few days, if that much, every time a commissioner of police – or acting commissioner of police, for that matter – must be out of the country.

Parliament sittings require resources. They take ministers away from matters on their desks. They keep MPs away from constituency offices. It is wasteful to have to do this for what would, in other contexts, be an ordinary administrative matter.

And yet there is good reason to resist Dr Rowley’s suggestion that the PSC be allowed to make acting appointments without all the fuss of a parliamentary debate.

Acting appointments have never just been acting appointments in this country. Under our Constitution, acting appointees are vested with the same powers as substantive post-holders, even if they do not command the same moral authority.

And all manner of controversial decisions have, in our history, been taken by acting officials. They have made appointments, proclaimed laws and, effectively, gone on to serve in posts for years, rendering them substantive office-holders in substance if not form.

There is no better example of the latter than what has unfolded in the police service over the last few decades. We have seen acting commissioners act for years.

It seems correct for such officials to be subject to the same standards of vetting, scrutiny and debate as their substantive comparators.

While undoubtedly emergency situations will arise which require swift action to plug constitutional gaps, when it comes to the police service, there is specific reason to require an overabundance of procedure.

An acting police commissioner sits on the National Security Council, approves budgetary matters and has vast resources at his or her disposal.

With concerns about the murky overlap between politics and policing in this country, we stand to benefit from even greater scrutiny of appointees, even if this means the inconvenience of a parliamentary debate.

As we have seen in the recent past, piecemeal amendment of legislation, while potentially practical, is often fraught with peril.

The deeper need here is not the need simply to address one issue, but rather to overhaul the way appointments are made not only to the post of Commissioner of Police, but also other sensitive posts within the public service that require officials to act without fear or favour.

In fact, some might flippantly say if there were a change that should be made, it should be that acting prime ministers should also be vetted before they wield powers nobody ever wished them to have.