…will see Select Committee scrutiny
HEAD of the Presidential Secretariat Dr. Roger Luncheon yesterday announced that, before the end of this month, the government will be tabling the Access to Information legislation in the National Assembly. Dr. Luncheon, who is also Secretary to the Cabinet, made the disclosure during his post-Cabinet press briefing held at the Office of the President yesterday.

“Cabinet gave their final go ahead for the two pieces of priority legislation: the Consumer Affairs Bill and the Access to Information Bill,” he said.

According to Dr. Luncheon, this go-ahead by Cabinet would see the necessary fine-tuning and proofreading which their tabling in the National Assembly would immediately follow.

“The expectation is that this will occur by the end of April 2011 or very soon thereafter,” he said.
He said also that Cabinet gave the go ahead for the tabling of two additional bills from the agricultural sector: the Animal Health Bill and the Plant Health Bill. Luncheon said a third bill was brought to Cabinet for the first time and this was a ‘Seeds Bill’.

According to the HPS, quite a bit of the drafting of the Access to Information Bill was modelled on existing and comparable legislation.

“At the Cabinet level, we paid particular attention to Caricom models, actual legislations from Belize, Jamaica, Trinidad and further afield [such as] the British and Canadian models were also looked at and we liberally borrowed elements that would be appropriate to the Guyanese reality,” he explained to reporters.

“We want to, as usual, produce legislation that is practical, legislation that we could all be proud of. I would want to believe that the contribution at the Committee stage, considering this legislation before its enactment, would contribute to our objectives. I would be surprised if the Access to Information legislation is not examined and further discussed at the level of the committee stage in Parliament,” the HPS said.