Trillanes' Talk Ng Talk Mobile Plan Won't Sell In The Parliamentary System

I remembered how I wrote a joke on whether or not you'd avail of Antonio Trillanes IV's mobile plan. Can you imagine him selling his mobile plan in a parliamentary system especially if he has to face the weekly question hour? Bad news for him is that it won't work for this reason. Not especially if you know how the parliamentary system's debate process actually works.

Here's a sample diagram of a debate I found from Taiwan Debate Open. You can see the flow of the format between the majority and minority floors. Let's assume that we have Prime Minister Rodrigo R. Duterte, Deputy Prime Minister Leni Loud Robredo, Liberal Party and PDP Laban as the majority blocs, and then the rest as the Minority Bloc. Now let's imagine Antonio Trillanes IV is the Opposition Leader, Grace Poe-Llamanzares is the Deputy Opposition Leader for a start. Then maybe we can have Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as the Speaker of the House in this imagined scenario.

The rule goes that everyone has their time allotted. Each of them only has 7.5 minutes of speaking time. Opposition Leader Trillanes would only be allowed 7.5 minutes to make his speech at the Weekly Question Hour. Chances are both his side (the Opposition) and the majority side would probably gang up against him for wasting their time. Just imagine that Prime Minister Duterte delivers his 7.5 minutes speech followed up by Opposition Leader Trillanes would attempt to deliver his 35 minutes speech. You can imagine the frustration everyone will share having to listen to the overprivileged speech of Opposition Leader Trillanes. Chances are he would have a vote of no confidence coming in for him because of his Talk Ng Talk mobile plan.

It's just like a teacher who limits the number of words and pages in an essay. It's because he or she has to read through a mountain of essays and submit them depending on the deadline. The same happens with the parliamentary system. The time limit is so that everyone participating in the Weekly Question Hour will get their privilege speech chances for that entire session!