Amendments to Finance Act 2018 Introduced in National Assembly

ISLAMABAD, January 23, 2019: The government introduced the Finance Supplementary (Second Amendment) Bill 2019 in the National Assembly on Wednesday, observes Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN) in its Daily Factsheet.
Following are key observations of the proceedings during eighth sitting of the seventh session:

Members’ Participation

  • The Assembly met for an hour and 13 minutes.
  • The sitting started at 1747 hours against the scheduled time of 1630 hours.
  • The Speaker presided over the entire sitting while the Deputy Speaker did not attend the sitting.
  • The Leader of House (Prime Minister) attended the sitting for an hour and three minutes.
  • The Leader of the Opposition attended the sitting for an hour and nine minutes.
  • As many as 112 lawmakers (33%) were present at the outset and 237 (69%) at the adjournment of the sitting.
  • The parliamentary leaders of ANP, PML-N, PPPP, GDA, MQM, BAP, PML and JWP attended the sitting.
  • As many as eight out of 10 minority lawmakers were present.

Output  

  • The Minister for Finance, Revenue and Economic Affairs introduced the Finance Supplementary (Second Amendment) Bill, 2019 which aims to give effect to taxation and other financial proposals of the federal government.  The minister spoke on the bill for 45 minutes.
  • The House did not take up the remaining legislative up business on the agenda.

Order and Institutionalization

  • As many as two lawmakers including the Leader of the Opposition and Minister for Foreign Affairs spoke on two Points of Order (POs) consuming 16 minutes of the proceedings. These POs were related to Sahiwal incident.
  • The House was adjourned to meet again on January 24, 2019 (Thursday) at 1100 hours.

Transparency

  • ‘Orders of the Day’ was available to the legislators, observers and public.
  • Attendance of lawmakers was available to the media and observers.

This daily factsheet is based on direct observation of the National Assembly’s proceedings, conducted by the Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN). Errors and omissions are excepted.