Functions
The Speaker determines when a sitting of the House should open and close, and may suspend the sitting for a brief period of time if necessary. He is also in charge of ensuring the Constitution and Standing Orders of the House are given due respect, disciplining members of the House, determining who shall have the floor during a sitting, calling a vote, and checking for a quorum when the House meets. He only participates in a vote when there is a tie. The Speaker also has powers some allege to be excessive, such as imposing limits on the posing of supplementary questions during Question Time — an important procedure for the legislature to examine the government's actions, the power to restrict the tabling of questions for Question Time, and the power to amend written copies of speeches made by members of the House before they are given verbally.
Read more about this topic: Speaker Of The Dewan Rakyat
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others’. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery—more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)