Leader of the House Indranee Rajah asked for an apology from the Progress Singapore Party (PSP) in Parliament on Jul. 5, 2023, over a video posted by PSP on their Facebook page at 11:41pm the day before.

The Facebook post has since been amended.

What was the video about

Indranee raised the issue of the video in Parliament as a point of order, as she believed it was in breach of the Parliament (Privileges, Immunities and Powers) Act.

She explained that the video showed an exchange between PSP's Secretary-General and Non-Constituency MP, Leong Mun Wai, and Deputy Speaker Christopher de Souza during clarifications for the ministerial statements on renting Ridout Road properties by ministers K Shanmugam and Vivian Balakrishnan.

Indranee said the video was an edited version of parliamentary proceedings, which showed Leong Mun Wai asking for the "debate" not to end as "all Singaporeans are watching this debate". De Souza then explained to him that the clarifications were not a debate.

The exchange between them went on, and the video was cut, ending with De Souza saying, "So there's no debate, whether under standing order 23 or standing order 25, which is a personal explanation."

Indranee then pointed out that the video caption in the Facebook post mentioned: "what some online commenters are calling another 'sia suay' moment".

"What is sia suay? [It means] embarrassing. There has to be something embarrassing. What is this embarrassing thing?"

She then added that the "blurbs" in the video also suggested that Leong was being shut down and a debate was not allowed.

Asked for Leong's explanation on misleading video

Indranee explained that the video does not explain that for ministerial statements, Members of Parliament (MPs) can ask questions or clarifications, but it is not technically characterised as a debate.

She said the point is that the ministers are still held to account, and they did put themselves up for questioning and did answer the questions.

Not only that, she added that it was not true that Leong was not allowed to ask questions as, in fact, he asked "something like 11 questions or clarifications".

Indranee also took issue with the video suggesting that clarifications only occurred for one hour when the entire session took around six hours, including three hours and 48 minutes of clarifications, which she believed was ample time for questions to be asked, and answered.

She asked Leong, Secretary-General of the PSP, to explain "why such a misleading post and video has been put up".

Leong said 'sia suay' refers to him

In response, Leong clarified that "sia suay" refers to what online commenters called him, and it did not mean it to be about De Souza.

He said that the video intended to point out that it was another moment of "sia suay" of him when he was" trying to get the facts".

Leong admitted that he was "maybe slightly a bit excited" during the "debate" but thought he had conducted himself respectfully with the Deputy Speaker and had not violated any rules during the proceedings.

He explained that he agreed with what the Deputy Speaker was saying but found the differentiation between debate and clarifications "interesting", resulting in the video.

After clarifying and confirming that Leong meant that "sia suay" was referring to himself, Indranee asked Leong to consider taking down the video and making an apology in a form acceptable to the Parliament.

She asked him to let Parliament know his party's decision during the session on Jul. 6, 2023.

Top image via MCI