Last Monday the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Anglu Farrugia, spoke about the need to use parliamentary time in the most efficient way possible.

In his address to commemorate the Sette Giugno, the riots that took place on 7 June 1919 which led to the establishment of Malta’s first Parliament in 1921, Farrugia said that it is imperative that an agreement is reached between the two sides of the House to limit the time allowed for each MP to make their arguments.

This is even more important, he said, since the number of MPs has now ballooned to 79, making it the largest Parliament ever in Malta’s history. The fact that now there are more representatives wanting to have their say during plenary sessions makes it necessary for Parliament’s Standing Orders to be revised so as to reduce the amount of time allotted to each member.

We totally agree and we have been saying this for quite a while.

Mr Speaker mentioned 20 minutes. We believe it can be much shorter than that. An argument on any given Bill may be made in much less time. At the European Parliament where, admittedly, there are more members and therefore they need to have better control of the proceedings, speakers are allotted three minutes.

In our case, perhaps we should not be so drastic, but there should certainly be a tighter limit on the time that each MP is given for an argument to be made. There is certainly no need for such speeches to last 20 minutes.

This takes us to the content of these speeches.

Too often, we have had occasions when one full parliamentary session goes by without there being anything worth reporting. We’re talking mostly about the central part of each parliamentary sitting. The first part, which is question time, is usually the most interesting, and often the most newsworthy. The third part, adjournment time, could also be worth following, although this largely depends on the MP who is speaking and, more importantly, the subject at hand. In the last half hour of the sitting, MPs have the opportunity to raise any issue which they feel is important enough to warrant it being presented before the House. It works on a rotation basis, one time for the government side, the next for the Opposition.

The middle part, which is the longest segment of the sitting – two-and-a-half-hours – is the time when laws are debated, discussed and amended. This is the part that the Speaker was referring to when he suggested that an agreement should be found between the two sides for the time allotted to each MP who wants to take part in the proceedings to be reviewed.

It is understandable that the minister piloting the Bill in hand is given more time than other MPs to explain the law and go into some details. It is equally understandable if the main spokesperson from the other side of the House is also given more time to put forward the Opposition’s position on the matter.

What is not understandable is that then we have a string of MPs, on either side, who are allowed so much time to speak. Very often, these speeches turn out to be long-winded, repetitive and of little value to the ongoing debate. One frequently gets the impression that the MP was either forced to speak to fill up the time or did very little preparation before switching on the microphone or simply wants to be seen as contributing. In short, this would be a complete waste of time.

This happens throughout the whole year, but more particularly when the House is discussing budgetary measures. MPs know that the Budget Speech and the sittings during which the measures for the different ministries are being debated, attract more followers; so many of them, if not all, elbow for space in the list of speakers when Party whips are planning the sittings. At the end of the day, however, many of the speeches are not worth the paper they are written on.

Now that we have 79 Members of Parliament, the Speaker is right to call for an urgent revision of the way sittings are divided. Having MPs going on for 20 minutes and, at times, visibly stretching their argument to fill up the time, is not the way forward.

MPs should learn to speak less, and say more. They should only speak when they have something to say, and not just to say something.