Judges’ Pension Bill Debate Turns Senate into Late Night Sitting

The Senate pushed past ten p.m. Wednesday as tensions flared over a divisive judges’ pension bill. The debate, shifting behind closed doors, focused on vesting terms and payout rates, leaving livestream viewers in the dark. After hours of back-and-forth and repeated votes, the bill scraped through seven to six. Church Senator Louis Wade broke ranks to back the government. The move comes just weeks before Justice Antoinette Moore’s retirement in August, raising the stakes of the late-night showdown.

 

On The Phone: Glenfield Dennison, Union Senator

“We juxtaposed it against the pension scheme for the parliament, especially where the vesting period and the vesting period and the contributions would have been explicitly spelled out in the In the Parliamentary Pensions Act, and this one we were saying was a little bit too far ahead, like in terms of what it was giving. And so we were just trying our best to compromise with what is reasonable. And there were calls for us to bring in an expert, but I understand there was a need to urgently  pass the piece of legislation for two judges who were retiring in August and September. And so we, we spent a lot of time debating back and forth. A lot of divisions were called to try to hammer out the specifics of certain clauses. And at the end when the leader for government business had gone through all his proposed amendments and we had gone through all of them. The bill was brought back for a third reading and, um, I had called for a division because the, the union was not in support of the, the bill in its current formulation.”

 

Dennison added that the bill’s wording creates confusion and expects amendments will be needed later.

 

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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