10th Parliament· 154 sittings on record · 30,475 speeches · latest 10 June 2026

Hon. Sajith Premadasa

Samagi Jana Balawegaya· Colombo· 4 March 2026 ·Debate: Debate: Microfinance and Credit Regulatory Authority Bill - Second Reading

Corruption & Governance ReformParliamentary Procedure
AI summary generated by gpt-5.5

Hon. Sajith Premadasa criticized the Government’s selective use of Standing Orders, arguing that they are suspended when politically convenient but invoked to deny the Opposition representation. He demanded that Standing Orders be suspended in this case to allow the Opposition to hold the Chair and majority in the relevant Committee, warning that the Government’s approach was moving toward a one-party State.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 Hon. Deputy Speaker, I did not receive a clear answer. You say you will act under Standing Orders, but the Government suspends Standing Orders when it wishes, and applies them when it suits. Here, too, Standing Orders could be suspended to give the Opposition the Chair and the majority in the Committee. The Government suspends Standing Orders when advantageous to it—this is building a one-party State.

Provenance

Source
Hansard, Wednesday, 4 March 2026 ·No. 23360 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
Page · column
not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
Permalink
/lk/speeches/13453

Cite as: Hon. Sajith Premadasa. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 4 March 2026. No. 23360. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/13453