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

The Hon. Sajith Premadasa

Samagi Jana Balawegaya· Colombo· 18 February 2026 ·Debate: Debate: Special Commodity Levy Act, Customs Ordinance Resolution, and Motor Traffic Act Orders (Continuation)

EducationParliamentary Procedure
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Hon. Sajith Premadasa objected to the prohibition of Opposition questions on education matters and tabled the relevant letter in Parliament. He argued that the Opposition was raising national policy issues, not personal or inappropriate matters, and criticized what he described as unequal treatment allowing the Government wider speaking freedom while restricting Opposition questions.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 Hon. Presiding Member, please grant me one more minute.

¶ 02 We are told to learn lessons from him. Hon. Presiding Member, I table the letter pertaining to the prohibition of our education questions.

¶ 03 This is anti-democratic. The whole country must know. We do not come here to ask obscene questions. We do not table details about obscene websites. We come here to discuss issues in the education sector.

¶ 04 Let me be clear. In the morning we do not ask personal questions; we ask about the country’s issues. However, while we lack the right to ask in the morning, in the evening the Government speaks for hours as they please. We will not allow a situation where freedom is for the Government and restrictions for the Opposition.

¶ 05 Thank you.

Provenance

Source
Hansard, Wednesday, 18 February 2026 ·No. 23308 ·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/20353

Cite as: The Hon. Sajith Premadasa. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 18 February 2026. No. 23308. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/20353