The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake
Bimal Rathnayake cautioned that when Committee Reports are presented, Committee Chairs should primarily convey the Committee’s collective position rather than personal views. He said that allowing Chairs to make substantive remarks outside a specific debate could make Committee proceedings appear biased or one-sided, while noting he did not object to the Member responding to a newspaper report. He added that issues relating to the Inland Revenue (Amendment) Bill should be addressed during the relevant debate.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 rose.
¶ 02 Hon. Speaker.
¶ 03 Hon. Speaker, while respecting the right to debate and discuss in Parliament — and such debates should, in fact, increase — I wish to raise this matter. When presenting a Committee Report, we believe that, if not 100 percent, at least to a large extent, the fundamental view of the Committee should be presented by the respective Committee Chair. Today, since there is a specific newspaper report concerning the Hon. Member, I understand that he presented points about it. If all Committee Chairs begin to present matters on Committee Reports without a special debate, then, in my view, the Committee becomes somewhat biased and one-sided. That is the point I wished to make. I am not opposed to the Hon. Member presenting points today. However, taking the last point he presented, that is not the way to do it. We can address that during the debate on the Inland Revenue (Amendment) Bill. I mean, you have to represent the Committee, not the Hon. Rauff Hakeem.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Tuesday, 19 May 2026 ·No. 23608 ·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/29110
Cite as: The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 19 May 2026. No. 23608. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/29110