The Hon. Sajith Premadasa - Leader of the Opposition
The Leader of the Opposition objected to a proposal to instruct Ministry Secretaries to limit answers given under Standing Order 27(2) to five minutes. He argued that matters such as public financial management and the country’s bankruptcy require full responses, emphasizing Parliament’s authority over public finance and warning that limiting answers would curtail democratic rights.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Please wait a moment, Hon. Speaker. He stated that Secretaries to Ministries should be instructed to limit Answers under Standing Order 27(2) to five minutes. Then how are we to discuss matters such as public financial administration and management, and the declaration of bankruptcy of the country?
¶ 02 The power over public finance lies with this Parliament. How can he say such a thing? Give me one more minute. We are now in a highly participatory situation. Our democratic rights are being curtailed more and more. You cannot limit Answers to five minutes. Answers cannot be limited to a time slot. To be truthful, the Answer must be properly presented.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Thursday, 19 February 2026 ·No. 23328 ·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.
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/lk/speeches/30342
Cite as: The Hon. Sajith Premadasa - Leader of the Opposition. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 19 February 2026. No. 23328. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/30342