Gail Alexan­der

A re­quest was made to the Clerk of the Sen­ate to call all mem­bers to par­tic­i­pate in the first vote dur­ing the com­mit­tee stage of the Bac­te­ri­o­log­i­cal and Tox­in Chem­i­cal Weapons Bill last week, Sen­ate vice-pres­i­dent Lyn­di­ra Ou­dit has em­pha­sised. Ou­dit point­ed this out in a state­ment to the Sen­ate yes­ter­day.

"Con­trary to a re­port in a dai­ly news­pa­per, there was no de­lay in the start of vot­ing, and no bi­ased call on­ly to Gov­ern­ment mem­bers," she said. Ou­dit said the re­port was com­plete­ly in­cor­rect and mis­lead­ing and some ef­fort should have been made to ob­tain clar­i­fi­ca­tion or ex­pla­na­tion be­fore its pub­li­ca­tion.

She said the du­ty and re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of the pre­sid­ing of­fi­cer was to en­sure as far as pos­si­ble that the rights of each mem­ber are not on­ly pro­tect­ed but ex­er­cised to the fullest pos­si­ble ex­tent at every op­por­tu­ni­ty. Ou­dit said the pre­sid­ing of­fi­cer has wide-rang­ing au­thor­i­ty, ex­tend­ing to mat­ters as di­verse as the be­hav­iour of mem­bers, rule of de­bate, dis­rup­tions and con­duct of pro­ceed­ings both dur­ing de­bate and com­mit­tee stage.

Ou­dit not­ed sev­er­al Stand­ing Or­ders, in­clud­ing 46(2) which states that sub­ject to Stand­ing Or­der 8 (5), every sen­a­tor present shall record his vote for ei­ther the "Ayes" or the "Noes."

She said: "The mean­ing of 'sen­a­tors present' is to be ob­tained in Stand­ing Or­der 8 (6), which di­rects any avoid­ance of doubt by clear de­c­la­ra­tion that sen­a­tors to be sum­moned by the clerk un­der this Stand­ing Or­der shall be those sen­a­tors who are not in the Cham­ber of the Sen­ate but are with­in the precincts there­of."

Ou­dit said the chair made every ef­fort to al­low for the ex­er­cise of rights of all mem­bers and to avoid any pos­si­bil­i­ty of in­val­i­da­tion of any vot­ing in de­bate or com­mit­tee. She said the pre­sid­ing of­fi­cer is the ser­vant, nei­ther of any one part of the Sen­ate, nor of the ma­jor­i­ty or the mi­nor­i­ty, but rather of the en­tire Sen­ate as a whole and must ap­ply the Stand­ing Or­ders in a con­sis­tent and rea­son­able man­ner.

She al­so praised what she de­scribed as the yeo­man ser­vice of many long-stand­ing jour­nal­ists, who she said "of­fer com­mend­able re­port­ing in a fair, rea­son­able and pro­fes­sion­al man­ner."