For every Bill (a proposed law), there are 3 readings by the Minister in Parliament. There is supposed to be a debate after the 2nd and 3rd reading. But since the ruling party has an overwhelming majority in Parliament, and the Whip is rarely lifted on their MPs, any Government Bills are sure to pass. Any debate is quite inconsequential. But I guess if the MPs raise valid objections, the Govt might amend the Bills, although I can’t point to any instance where that has happened.

fireeaver – You can just go down to Parliament house. Exchange your IC for a pass, and deposit your bag and camera phone. Admission is free and you can go in and out anytime. Only thing is you have to know when Parliament is sitting. That is usually announced a few days before the sitting in the press, or you can check the Order Paper at http://www.parliament.gov.sg. Sittings usually start at 1pm.

Choong Yong – One of the MPs told me that the voting records can be found in the Parliamentary reports, although I haven’t checked it myself. In any case, if no one highlights it, it will probably be overlooked.

I agree with you that the objective of attending Parliament should not be to ‘catch’ the MSM. But I think more ordinary Singaporeans should go down to see our limited democracy in action.

From what I understand, the part you described is not real voting per-se, but more of a consensus gather by the Speaker from the MPs on proceeding to the next item in the agenda. Agree that during my visits to the Parliament, the MPs rarely even bother to utter the “aye” when the Speaker asks the question, but I was told there was one incident in the past when one of the opposition MPs (not sure who) registered his displeasure of not getting a satisfactory answer from a Minister that he said a loud “no” in response to the Speaker’s question.

I think the serious voting will occur in cases where there is a motion in the house where the MPs need to show a certain stand, like the recent voting on whether a by-election should be called in Jurong. I am not sure if the voting records are available to the public though. I would very much like to see something like http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ done in Singapore, but lack the time and resources to implement this.

As for your suggestion of blogger roster, I think it boils down to whether there are enough interested individuals who bother to attend the Parliament. I wrote the article with the main intention of telling people that they are missing out on certain things if they don’t go to the Parliament in person. It might be a boring thing for most to spend the 5-6 hours in the public gallery, but I am sure you will agree that one learns a lot more about the particular set of policies discussed that day. It was more of a coincidence that I managed to catch some of the more interesting happenings in Parliament, and my account caught the attention of people. However, at the end of the day, if bloggers attend Parliament for the sake of trying to ‘catch’ the main stream media not reporting certain things, it seems to me to be more of an exercise to make the mainstream media look bad.

My take is, just go with the usual bloggers’ behaviour – bloggers will go to where they are interested in, and write down things that they think are worth recording. Trying to organise bloggers is probably not an easy thing to do, and probably not a good idea either.