Late House Starts Indicative of a Wider Problem

Ten a.m. was the given time for the commencement of the Sitting of the House of Parliament on Tuesday, but it was not until after 11 that proceedings got underway — a ‘Lucian Time’ trend that is indicative not only of the nature of our politics but of wider societal bad habits that will see us perpetually remain a so-called Third World state.

Speaker Andy Daniel, acknowledging the very) late start was an issue, offered a pre-emptive mea culpa, followed by an explanation: “technical difficulties.”

“Let me apologise to all for the late start of the session and that is due to some technical difficulties,” Speaker Daniel stated at the commencement of proceedings.

And although by the end, the Parliamentarians present had been like the rest of us, awaiting the start “technical difficulties” cannot explain the late arrival of so many of those selfsame parliamentarians to a sitting convened for the purpose of discussing matters and laws pertinent to the lives of the citizenry they were all and each elected to serve.

This is not an off-the-cuff situation, as it happens almost every time. Even people following the proceedings from home find they have to wait for at least almost an hour before the proceedings get under way.

This laissez-faire attitude towards these simple tasks, no matter how mundane and repetitive they may seem, is one of the things which keeps us where we are as a country — debt ridden with our hands out, begging the EU, the Taiwanese and the US for a buck — a poor mentality which leads to a poor state.

When our elected officials travel, or are on a state visit overseas, I wonder how many times they arrive twenty, thirty or even forty minutes after the slated time? If it’s unacceptable overseas at these high-stakes meetings, then it should also be unacceptable for our Sitting of the House.

And this pertains not only to parliamentarians but to the citizenry in general. Why do you think our elected officials tend to have this attitude? They come from among the people, do they not?

This lack of a sense of urgency, this laid-back attitude to anything that is our own, is one of the reasons our country is so mediocre.

Rather than improve our collective effort, we prefer to sit on our hands and call Trump a racist because it’s the “woke” thing to do.

Guess what: when Trump referred to countries like ours as “sh****** countries”, he didn’t make it so, he was simply calling a spade a spade. We’re a sh****** country because, from the top down and from the ground up, the majority of us have a sh****** mentality towards the menial and the mundane — the fundamental things that make things go and that separate the civilised and prosperous from the barbaric and mediocre.