Watch Your Tax-Shekels At Work for You!

Did you know that you can see if our MKs are busy working for us minute by minute?

The Knesset website has a feature I just discovered and you have to give it a try. Go to this Knesset link and you can see which MKs are currently in the building. At the time I began writing this piece, 19:32, there were 33 MKs present in the Knesset building.

Of course, being out of the building does not necessarily mean they are not hard at work. After all, at this precarious point in time, there are election campaigns to run. So the MKs could be out at parlour meetings or central party committee meetings (for those that run democratically, that is). It seems that for almost a year now, our tax shekels are paying for MKs to stay on the campaign trail rather than legislate.

But then, there may be diligent MKs who are out meeting with people important to their parliamentary tasks, perhaps researching and drawing up legislation that they want to put on the table when there will be a parliament that can actually vote for bills. I do suppose the Cabinet ministers have jobs to do even though they are a caretaker government. At least from the news it appears to be so.

And let us remember, MKs have marriages to keep together and children to hug and raise. So it’s not a bad thing that they are out of the Knesset building and going home for the night.

It seems reasonable to suggest that being in the Knesset building (regardless of the time of day) does not necessarily mean they are engaged in work-related activities. I wonder what, beyond working on their campaigns, they can really be doing when parliament does not sit. Perhaps some are having an extended dinner or after dinner drinks in the cafeteria, chatting about the weather or other irrelevant small talk. On the other hand, if they are talking about the climate rather than the weather, then it may be time well spent and worth our paying for. After all, we are concerned about climate change, are we not?

Perhaps some MKs are having affairs with each other and making “good” use of their offices for private intimacies. Hmmm. Not nice of me to suggest such a thing, eh?

In the time it took me to write this down, another dedicated (to what?) MK entered the building. Where did he go within the building? The Knesset website has not given us access to the security cameras in the halls. But have fun guessing what they might be doing. OOPS. Someone just left! OOPS again. In the time it took me to upload the article, another one took off. This is fun!