EVEN before Wednesday's sitting of Parliament was called to order, the session was something of an embarrassment for the Government.

While sittings during the fixed recess are not unprecedented, they are usually reserved for situations in which there is an urgent need for the House to meet. That Government had to invoke this process to address a situation that was, for all intents and purposes, of its own making, was humiliating.

For it was the Cabinet, and Cabinet alone, that only a few weeks ago took the decision to advise President Christine Kangaloo to proclaim key sections of the long-delayed procurement law on April 25.

Some days later, the Cabinet again asked the President to act, this time to proclaim, on May 12, an amendment to the law which had been passed in 2020, controversially opening the door to certain exemptions. These proclamations were meant to herald the dawn of a new era.

By Wednesday, however, Minister of Finance Colm Imbert, who had himself on May 29 invoked a glaringly flawed law in exempting the Judiciary, was rising to his feet in the House to open debate on hastily-brought amendments to correct the same obvious flaw which he and the Cabinet had just advised the President to proclaim and which he himself had not long ago invoked.

Not only that, but Government seeks, through additional amendments, to make it easier for Cabinet to whittle down the ambit of the law by promulgating exemptions without automatic debate and to reduce the scope of the law by introducing a $1 million threshold.

Such changes are, debatably, par for the course.

But how is it that no legislator or official ever noticed their necessity during the two-decade-long gestation period of the law?

Were adequate steps taken by the Cabinet to ascertain the State's readiness to implement this legislation before having it proclaimed?

There is already a $1 million threshold in operation in the public service for accounting officers. Why was it not noticed before now that such a threshold is necessary?

'There are many things which have occurred in the last couple of months which have made it necessary to make changes,' Mr Imbert said Wednesday. Among them, he said, was the emergence of even more 'obvious errors' in regulations.

Why were these errors not picked up by the Cabinet, by the procurement regulatory body, and by legislators?

It is not good enough to suggest, as the minister does, that it is because the law is novel. The legislative reform process has taken years, involving detailed scrutiny by successive parliamentary committees.

This 'validation' legislation is not only an embarrassment for the Government. It is, lamentably, an embarrassment for the country.

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