Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague. In the 12 years I have been here, I have seen some deplorable, thuggish behaviour. It is up to the Speaker to handle that, and I think in this Parliament the role of the Speaker has attempted to do that.
I guess my concern is there is a tendency to infantilize this House as though we are all bad children; we use penalty box metaphors.
I came here to speak truth to power. I did not come here to belong to an august little club where we all pat each other on the back and say, “What an excellent question”.
Decorum is about truth and answering.
I would suggest one of the main problems that I see, which adds a great deal of frustration, is that we have people standing in the House, reading things that were written by somebody else, and we can tell they are reading something that was handed to them five minutes ago. What are they doing here? Why not just have their staff come in?
To read repeated notes from ministers, day after day, is a debasement of debate, so yes, I get frustrated. I would suggest we return to the Standing Orders that existed, whereby we have to just speak. It might be a bit more difficult for us. We might be a little wibbly-wobbly for a while; but that would actually restore a level of accountability in the House, because what is happening under this faux decorum is that we are being run like vacuous marionettes by whatever political staffers higher up are saying, such as “This is what you are going to read today. This is what you are going to say, and in trouble, say only this”.
That is not democracy.
I would like to ask my hon. colleague about how we can cut those strings of the marionettes so we can actually start to speak truth to power, get proper responses, and do it in a dignified fashion.