Deputy Speaker Brings Back Fresh Ideas To Parliament

Fresh from a high-level parliamentary seminar in the United Kingdom, Deputy Speaker of the House Marconi Leal is looking to bring new ideas back home to strengthen Belize’s legislative process. The training held under the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association brought together lawmakers from across the Commonwealth to exchange best practices on improving efficiency, transparency and debate within national assemblies. Leal says one of the key takeaways is the growing use of technology, including artificial intelligence tools to help lawmakers better analyze and debate legislation and he’s now exploring how some of those ideas can be adapted for use in Belize’s National Assembly.

 

Marconi Leal, Deputy Speaker, House of Representatives

“It was more from the frame point of myself being the deputy speaker, having those conversations with different members of the Commonwealth to share and exchange ideas to talk about the things that they do. What work, what doesn’t work? How can we better build capacity within parliament to make it more effective? And so there were key discussions around some of the tools that are being utilized to evolve technology and that can be utilized. And one of the key things that jumped out on me, and we all talk about Chat GPT, but so many parliaments are utilizing different tools to summarize some of these bills and to look into key components of bills that are going out there that they would want to zoom in into to see how they can better debate these bills, challenge these bills, compare these bills to other bills across the Commonwealth or across the world.”

 

Shane Williams

“Now, how do we adapt some of these best practices?”

 

Marconi Leal

“We definitely adapt them. I’ll be sitting with the Speaker and with the clerk. Mr. Grant was there, who is a key member at the National Assembly. We’ll be sitting down talking about some of the quick wins that we think that we have to consider for implementation and then we go from there with some of the ideas that we come back with.”

 

Leal says he’ll now meet with the Speaker’s team to decide which tech tools can be quickly put to work to make the National Assembly more efficient.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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