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

The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake

Jathika Jana balawegaya· National List· 6 June 2025 ·Oral question: Oral Question: Ambassadors and High Commissioners with Dual Citizenship

AgricultureParliamentary Procedure
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Bimal Rathnayake said Ministers should generally answer parliamentary Questions with reference to the date on which they were asked, but noted that Members often seek information on the current situation. Citing paddy procurement as an example, he argued that a rigid date-based approach may be impractical when circumstances have changed, and called for a common understanding to avoid confusion.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 Mr. Speaker, we have nothing to hide. Put this Question aside. When a Question is asked of a Minister, the simplest way to avoid confusion is to answer based on the date the Question was asked. But that is not always necessary; often Members ask about the current situation. Think about a question on paddy procurement—at the time of the Question, harvesting may not even have begun. That is my point. We are not hiding anything. Let us proceed with a common understanding.

Provenance

Source
Hansard, Friday, 6 June 2025 ·No. 1750753418078417 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
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not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
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Cite as: The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 6 June 2025. No. 1750753418078417. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/28357