This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on March 3, 2025 - March 9, 2025

In my article last June, titled “An independent parliamentary service: A boon if done right, a bane if done wrong” (Issue 1529, June 24, 2024), I wrote of the government’s efforts to table a bill to establish an independent parliamentary service. The objective of an independent parliamentary service is to remove the executive branch’s control of parliament’s administration, human resource and financial affairs. It requires handing over power to a management body that answers to parliament, and a workforce that is separate from the public service and whose impartiality is protected.

It is a monumental task. It requires mediating competing political demands, the livelihood interests of the existing workforce, the state’s financial priorities and deeply held beliefs that it is the public bureaucracy that must operate public institutions.

Against these challenges, the government cannot be expected to deliver a perfect set of laws. But a fair expectation is that the government must deliver an effective bill, one that contains the building blocks for a stronger, independent parliament.

For the Pakatan Harapan coalition of parties, institutional reforms and good governance are their staple ideological offering and electoral promise. So an effective bill is also a demonstration of their political ability to navigate existing challenges to deliver real change.

Last Monday, the Madani government presented its Parliamentary Service Bill to the Dewan Rakyat, alongside another bill to make related amendments to the Federal Constitution. The bills will be debated and put to a vote in the coming week.

Measured against the indicators from my previous article, is the Parliamentary Service Bill a good bill, in terms of its effectiveness?

The short answer is, it cannot be an effective bill unless improvements are made to it before the Dewan Rakyat votes next week. Important building blocks are missing from the bill, most of which are similar to corporate governance standards required of the private sector. It is fair to expect parliament’s governance to meet the standards imposed on office floors across the country. Here is a summary of some important missing elements.

The Parliamentary Service Bill takes the positive step of creating a Parliamentary Service Council as the new management body to run the parliamentary service. But the proposed composition of the council raises questions about its ability to be independent, because the executive branch plays a role (either directly or indirectly) in the appointment of almost all of the council members, who are there by virtue of their official (ex-officio) positions.

Another six parliamentarians (two senators and four MPs) make up the rest of the council, but the bill does not say how they are to be appointed.

To dispel concerns that the government could wield influence over the council, the bill should make it clear that the executive will have no role in the appointment of these remaining members of the council. Instead, they should be appointed by parliament through the settled procedure in place for all major parties to negotiate the appointment of parliamentary select committee members, which includes the opposition. The process of appointment should be spelt out in the bill to make it binding on all governments that come after this one.

Absent from the bill is any duty on the council to report back to the two houses of parliament, or to be subjected to oversight by parliamentarians.

The council cannot operate outside parliament’s scrutiny; its operations impact parliament’s output and the ability of parliamentarians to function effectively. The solutions to ensure the council is accountable are plain and straightforward to implement. Parliaments in other countries set up parliamentary committees that advise and oversee the work of their management bodies. Their management bodies are also required to publish annual reports and financial statements. Similar measures must be required of the council, and can easily be added to the bill. These transparency and accountability measures are vital and must be given statutory force to ensure they are binding on present and future councils.

The bill establishes a parliamentary service, but only two parliamentary staff clearly fall under its purview: the Clerk of the Dewan Rakyat and the Clerk of the Dewan Negara, who are the senior-most parliamentary officers in their respective houses of parliament. No other parliamentary staff or department is expressly identified as falling under the parliamentary service.

The government’s intention may be to issue administrative regulations in the future to list departments that fall under “parliamentary service”. But that is a high-risk strategy, as it permits every new government that comes in to change the categories of staff who fall under “parliamentary service” simply by revoking old regulations and replacing them with new ones. The end result would be operational instability in parliament and job insecurity for its staff.

With no certainty of if and when all parliamentary staff will become parliamentary service staff, the public service will continue to serve parliament for the foreseeable future. So this bill offers nothing concrete to achieve one of the main objectives of creating a separate parliamentary service, which is to overcome the vulnerability of public servants to conflicts of interest and undue pressures that could impact their ability to impartially serve parliament.

Once again, measures to mitigate these risks are evident and straightforward to implement. As in other countries, a statutory provision can be included in the bill that requires all staff who work in parliament to exercise their functions impartially and in the best interests of parliament as a whole. Such a provision protects parliament and parliamentarians against staff who are partisan, while also shielding staff against undue pressure from external parties.

This bill does not tangibly expand parliament’s financial autonomy. The council is only given the power to “oversee all financial matters relating to the parliamentary service”, which is not a clear vesting of control over its budget, revenue and expenditure.

There are understandable difficulties in giving complete autonomy over budget and finances to parliament. But the bill should at least move the needle on this by giving parliament as a whole more control over its budget formulation, as is done in many other parliaments.

Rather unusually for a 21st century statute, the bill gives the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (YDPA) formal authority to issue regulations, after consultation with the council, on the qualifications, conditions, promotions and disciplinary process for parliamentary service staff. These regulations are a type of delegated legislation, where parliament empowers others (usually ministers) to issue edicts that have the binding force of law. Those empowered to issue delegated legislation are answerable to parliament for how they exercise that power. Will naming the YDPA as the formal prescribing authority for delegated legislation under the bill unintentionally place our constitutional monarch in the untenable position of having to answer to parliament?

Apart from that, the regulations in this case concern internal administrative matters of the parliamentary service. As such, any regulation that is seen as illegal, unreasonable, irrational and so on could be subject to judicial review. Were that to happen, as the formal prescribing authority, the office of the constitutional monarch may be embroiled in legal action.

The solution here is also straightforward. There is no need to subject the constitutional monarch to the risk of unintended consequences. Instead, the council should be given the power to directly prescribe delegated legislation, as is done in other countries. If it is necessary for another body to ratify the regulations, parliament can do so, since the regulations relate directly to their interests.

The subtext is clear from the missing text in this bill: the government has not managed to achieve convergence with the public service and Ministry of Finance for the creation of a fully independent parliamentary service and for parliament’s financial autonomy.

The government may be hoping that passing this bill will create the right space and conditions for progress to continue. That is a shortsighted goal. The bill as it is, is not future-proof. The existing vulnerabilities in the bill may not be abused by the current government and parliamentary leadership, who have stated their commitment to parliamentary reform. But in the hands of a future government with no interest in institutional independence, those vulnerabilities could be used to erode any present gains in parliamentary autonomy. The straightforward solutions offered in this article will erect some important guardrails to future-proof the Parliamentary Service Bill.

Maha Balakrishnan is a parliamentary and policy advocacy specialist, and research fellow at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network-Asia headquarters at Sunway University. She is a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group — Integrity, Governance and Anti-Corruption.

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