Well, you won't hear me complaining about the workload of Australian parliamentarians again.

After a gruelling session that started in July and looks like it'll wrap up shortly, the Cambodian National Assembly and its tag-along "Yeah, what he said" whipping boy, the Senate, has knocked off some four or five laws in total. A break is in order, and that much has been acknowledged by the Royal Government, which has announced a three'month recess for the parliamentarians to get a well'earned break.

The laws that have been passed have been worthy enough, don't get me wrong. The first was to approve the formation of government after the 12-month stalemate following the election in July 2003. Under the Cambodian Constitution, a 2/3 majority of the directly-elected National Assembly is required to form government. Not surprisingly, notwithstanding the political stranglehold on Cambodia enjoyed by Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian People's Party, a 2/3 majority is not that easy to come by. The upshot of this is that coalition governments are the order of the day for Cambodia. All (good) things in Cambodia take time, and the formation of a coalition is no exception. 12 months might be longer than one would ordinarily expect to wait, but patience is the only virtue worth hanging onto here. So, after endless rounds of negotiations about which party gets to put a porker at which trough, a coalition was formed in July 2004. Three or so months later, all we have to show for it is a lousy couple of laws that haven't advanced the cause of poverty reduction in quite the way I'd envisaged.

Chanted like a mantra by the pollies, "poverty reduction" is the catch-cry/panacea/raison-d'etre-you-have-when-you-don't-have-a-raison-d'etre for all pollies, diplomats and do-gooders (aka aid sector workers). I have no doubt they are reducing poverty in Cambodia; I just hadn't imagined that they would do it from the top down.

In the spirit of matters financial, though, came the law to approve Cambodia's accession to the World Trade Organisation, the WTO. Getting the WTO to let Cambodia join the club has been a labour of love for a couple of government officials over the last few years. The most public face of the campaign, here and abroad, has been His Excellency Sok Siphanna, the charismatic, bow-tie wearing, 11-fingered (only in Cambodia) Secretary of State of the Ministry of Commerce. Dozens of junkets and thousands of pages of reports later, though, even Sok Siphanna can't give you a straight answer as to why Cambodia needed to join. The cart is dragging the horse on this one, for sure, but how long that is going to last is not clear, either.

One of the things that Cambodia agreed to do as part of its initiation rites is commit itself to an agenda of enacting some 40 key pieces of legislation before January 2006. After the aforementioned-Stirling run that the parliament has had in 2004 (i.e. 4 laws, none of which is on that WTO agenda), this recess that the pollies are having is starting to look positively pre'emptive. Since the sum total of Cambodian law at the moment isn't much more than 40 (well, the good ones, anyway), if I were a Cambodian parliamentarian, I would be snoozing up and carbo loading right through the recess in anticipation of a long string of all'nighters in 2005 if they want any chance of not making poor old Siphanna look like more of a peanut than usual in front of the WTO heavies.

Big Law 3 for 2004 was the approval of the government's agreement with the United Nations, the UN, for the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. We can talk about this subject a whole other time, though, but let me put it out there and call it now by saying that it'll never get off the ground. The only conceivable winner would be the Cambodian people, in striking one small blow against the prevailing culture of impunity that is insurmountable to the man on the street. Unfortunately, the good of the ordinary Cambodian punter isn't usually the motive for anything 'round here.

Just the other day came our last law, delivering us a new King, King Norodom Sihamoni. Artistic, long'time Paris resident, dancer and choreographer and 51-year-old bachelor, the new King may not have produced any heirs that we know of (although it's not a hereditary monarchy, so that's not such an issue) but he will tango with the best of them as he takes to the Cambodian political dancefloor.

To Cambodian parliamentarians, I say "Rest on". 2004 may not be one much worth remembering, but your 2005 is shaping up as one for the ages.