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Thursday, July 10, 2025

New standing order seeks to end cross-talk

by

20140804

The Prime Min­is­ter will have to an­swer ques­tions for 30 min­utes dur­ing the new ses­sion of Par­lia­ment, MPs will have less speak­ing time and there is to be less of the in­fa­mous cross-talk in the House from now on.Speak­er Wade Mark an­nounced this dur­ing yes­ter­day's open­ing of the fifth ses­sion of the Par­lia­ment. He was speak­ing about the new Stand­ing Or­ders which will be in force from now af­ter be­ing changed by the Par­lia­ment for the first time since 1961.

Mark said Stand­ing Or­der 26 per­tains to prime min­is­ters' ques­tions, to be held dur­ing the sec­ond sit­ting of the House each month, for not more than 30 min­utes. Ques­tions may be put to the prime min­is­ter on cur­rent mat­ters of na­tion­al im­por­tance or on the gen­er­al per­for­mance of the gov­ern­ment and gov­ern­ment agen­cies.

He not­ed it al­so pro­vides for a max­i­mum speak­ing time of 45 min­utes-30 min­utes plus a 15-minute ex­ten­sion. It was for­mer­ly a to­tal of 75 min­utes. He said the onus is now on the MP speak­ing to re­quest an ex­ten­sion of their time, ei­ther dur­ing their speech or im­me­di­ate­ly up­on the ex­pi­ra­tion of their speak­ing time.Stand­ing Or­der 48, on "Con­tents of Speech­es," en­com­pass­es many of the mat­ters of­ten raised, such as rel­e­vance and use of in­sult­ing lan­guage.

Stand­ing Or­der 24 al­so al­lows for one mem­ber from each par­ty in op­po­si­tion to the gov­ern­ment to ask a brief ques­tion on­ly for elu­ci­da­tion on state­ments made by min­is­ters.Stand­ing Or­der 55 con­cerns dis­tur­bances of the pro­ceed­ings, which now in­cludes, along with te­dious rep­e­ti­tion, en­gag­ing in ex­ces­sive cross-talk and con­vers­ing nois­i­ly.


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