THE vice president of the National Legislative Assembly (NLA) said yesterday that the body might decide to make substantial changes to the draft organic laws to ensure the continuing performance of key agencies.

The NLA was entitled to revise the draft laws so long as they conformed to the referendum-endorsed constitution, Surachai Liengboonlertchai said.

However, if the Constitution Drafting Commission (CDC) disagreed with the fine-tuning to its draft laws, a joint committee would be set up to come up with a compromise.

“We’re all independent. The CDC can work independently to write the laws as they like. But when they come to me, I can revise them independently, too,” Surachai said.

If the laws were rejected by the NLA, the CDC would probably have to rewrite them. However, that was unlikely since a vote of two-thirds of the chamber was needed to throw them out. The CDC was working on the organic laws as required by the constitution. Once completed, they will be submitted to the NLA for deliberation of up to 240 days.

The NLA had assigned a working group to compare the new rules with the old ones, including whether it was really necessary to set qualifications so high for members of political parties or independent organisations.

“Some people even complained that eventually it would be impossible to find any candidates. And we’re trying to find out whether the criticism is right on,” he said.

“Instead of getting the best people to work for the country, we could end up having no one at all.”

The NLA’s working group was looking intensely at the laws to see how many commissioners would be spared, he said. Some agencies would only have one commissioner left, so it would be impossible for them to carry out their duties.

The alternative would be to allow the commissioners, as qualified by the previous constitution, to stay on.

Surachai said the NLA was deliberating whether that would be a good option to serve the public interest.

These points were what the NLA was looking at before making its final decision on the organic laws and how it should go about resetting the independent organisations to square one.

However, wiping out everything was not a good idea, he said, adding that if there was anything that should be changed to foster reform, then it should be changed.

However, a timetable should also be set for every party to make preparations during the transition for the new future, Surachai said.

Collecting the controversial membership fee for party membership could be difficult in the beginning, he said. If a party had a million members, sending a letter out to all of them would already cost around Bt5 million, so everyone has to weigh the change against its practicality, he said.

“I don’t like it if we only go by the book and it doesn’t work in the real world. We have to look at real life. And that is what the [NLA] is doing,” Surachai said.

Once the organic laws are submitted to the NLA, it will need information to deliberate the points before making a final decision, he added.