ROLE OF JOINT RULES COMMITTEE (JRC)

1. CONSTITUTION
(1) The Constitution, in Sec 45, states that a Joint Rules Committee must be established, for the purpose of "making rules and orders concerning the joint business of the Assembly and the Council".
(2) It is indicated that such rules and orders concerning joint business will include:
procedures to facilitate the legislative process.
establishment of joint committees to consider and report on bills, if required
establishment of a joint committee to review the Constitution at least annually
regulating the business of the JRC, mediation committees, the Constitutional Review Committee, and any other joint committees.

2. CORE BUSINESS
The Constitutional reference essentially relates to the core business of Parliament, and then specifically to the passage of legislation and the establishment and regulation of joint committees.

3. JOINT RULES
(
1 ) After the coming into operation of the Constitution, new Joint Rules were approved on 24 March 1999.

(2) It is informative just to get an overview of the range of issues covered by the joint rules themselves. Those issues are:
Joint sittings of the Houses
Joint committee system
Joint legislative process
Stopping of funds to provinces
Code of conduct for members

(3) Nevertheless, in the establishment of the Joint Rules Committee (from Joint Rule 53), its functions and mandate broadly extended beyond Parliament's core business to include all aspects of the management and administration of Parliament. Further, a range of Joint Rules Subcommittees was established, the majority of which focused on domestic matters related to the management and administration of the institution.

4. DIFFICULTIES

(1) Leaving aside the intended purpose of this model, in practice it gave rise to numerous difficulties.

(2) The distinction between practical, detailed management issues and policy-making became blurred, and as a result the Subcommittees and even the Joint Rules Committee itself increasingly ended up devoting much of their time to issues of micro-management.

(3) The Subcommittee on International Relations, for instance, ended up routinely processing individual invitations rather than focusing on policy matters.

(4) As a result, issues of policy and the core business of Parliament were quite largely sidelined.

5. CHALLENGES
(1) Proposals for a new governance model are on the agenda for today's meeting.

(2) Our Parliament is still in a process of transition and of developing practices to effectively carry out some of its core functions. Some issues related to this indeed appear on the agenda as legacy
reports from the second Parliament, for example the oversight and accountability recommendations and the scrutiny of delegated legislation. There are indeed many important issues relating to
Parliament's core functions that require the attention of the JRC.