Publicly initiated bills rarely survive process: TDRI

The findings are part of a study project titled “Improvement of the Legislative Process to Promote Public Participation”, TDRI vice president Somkiat Tangkitvanich said at a seminar yesterday.

Researcher Itsakul Unahakate said his team’s study of laws passed in the past five years showed that the average time needed for passage was 782 days. On average, the Council of State took 262 days to consider a law, compared with 125 days by the House of Representatives, 42 days by the Senate and 56 days by the National Legislative Assembly (the legislative agency appointed by the 2006 coup-makers).

The time was counted from the day the Cabinet approved a draft law until the day the resulting act took effect. 

The period under study covered the administrations of Thaksin Shinawatra and Abhisit Vejjajiva, during which 335 bills were proposed.

Thammasat University economics lecturer Pokpong Janvit, another researcher on the team, said that since the adoption of the 1997 Constitution, which first allowed members of the public to propose laws, 17 such proposals had been dropped for a lack of signatures, or, in the case of finance-related laws, failing to win approval from the prime minister. 

Five proposals failed because the House disapproved in principle, the term of the House ended or the Constitution was scrapped. The Senate rejected one proposal, while 11 others became stuck somewhere in the process.

Furthermore, the three laws initiated by the public that passed consideration were not the original drafts, but were parallel versions proposed by MPs or the government.

Pokpong said the main problem facing publicly initiated laws was not people’s enthusiasm or the quality and content of the draft laws, but the legislative process. On average, each step – drafting and signature gathering; parliamentary verification; and parliamentary consideration of the law – took 343 days.

Pokpong later presented a study exploring the role of the Council of State in legislation.

During the seminar, former deputy prime minister Wissanu Krea-ngam and Democrat MP Nakorn Machim said a national master plan for legislation should be drafted and followed by the government.

Wissanu also said the Cabinet, not the Council of State, was responsible for the way bills were passed or dropped, saying the Cabinet never provided the council with clear frameworks or guidelines.

“I’ve never seen any bill dropped during Cabinet consideration. That means the Cabinet is playing games. Listening to the debate, it often seemed that the Cabinet disagreed. If that was the case, it should simply have dropped such bills. But it couldn’t, as they were proposed by the party in charge of the [relevant] ministry. The Cabinet would criticise a bill on many points and then resolve to pass it on to the Council of State,” Wissanu said.

Somkiat yesterday also discussed the Thai legislative process as seen through the prism of Game Theory, which considers stakeholders’ negotiations and delegations in the process.