PRESS PUBLICATION STATEMENT BY WORKERS PARTY

Mr Speaker: My attention has been drawn to a statement purported to be issued by the chairman of the Workers Party and published in the Straits Times of Saturday, December 24th, 1960. The publication reads as follows:

STATEMENT BY WORKERS PARTY

SINGAPORE. Fri.- The Chairman of the Workers Party, Mr David Marshall, today issued this statement:

"The first meeting of the new executive committee of the Workers Party repeats that the Workers Party is not associated with Mr Ong Eng Guan and had never been associated with Mr Ong, but expresses its sympathy and respect for the heroic effort of Mr Ong in struggling against the attempt of the P.A.P. Government to silence him and nullify the choice of the people of Hong Lim."'

Hon. Members will recollect that on the 19th day of December, 1960, before the Deputy Prime Minister moved his motion in relation to the then Member for Hong Lim (Mr Ong Eng Guan), I went to some length to indicate that in my view, the motion should on no account be considered as a motion of censure and punishment moved in the interests of Government or of individuals in the Government, but should be treated as a motion which related to the dignity and prestige of this Assembly and therefore was a motion in the interests of the Assembly as a whole. I went on to say that if the House was satisfied that the conduct of the hon. Member for Hong Lim was such as to be an affront to its own dignity and prestige in the sense inter alia that that conduct had brought discredit to the House as a whole - not merely to individual Members of the Government Parliamentary Party or indeed to any other Member of the House or to persons outside the House - then the House might feel itself justified in condemning or censuring the hon. Member for Hong Lim and thereafter in proceeding to consider what punishment, consonant with its powers, it should mete out to him. I finally stressed that the motion would and had to proceed as a motion which affected the House as a whole and which invited the House in the first instance to say whether its dignity and prestige had not been affronted by the conduct of the hon. Member for Hong Lim.

In my view, therefore, the statement by the Chairman of the Workers Party is prima facie a gross, wilful and scandalous misrepresentation of the proceedings of this Assembly within the meaning of subsection (1) (c) of section 24 of the Legislative Assembly (Powers and Privileges) Ordinance, 1955, and I have accordingly referred the matter to the State Advocate-General for such action as he may think fit to take under that Ordinance.