LegCo sat for six days this time. Here is what actually happened, day by day, and what it means for you.
Day 1, housing, drugs and jobs
1,092 civil servants are on the waiting list for government housing. Wait time is one to four years. An online system to check your place in the queue is being considered, not live yet.
On drugs, government admitted that just telling kids drugs are bad does not work anymore, social media makes it look normal too fast. The approach is shifting to catching risk early, working through family and school.
Unemployment hit 5.2 percent in 2025, the highest in ASEAN. Foreign workers in the private sector went from about 60,000 in 2021 to over 82,000 now. Members raised this straight in the chamber.
Day 2, food, health and prices
Good news here. Brunei keeps three months of fertiliser and six months of chicken feed in reserve. Eggs are 100 percent home grown. There is a backup food and medicine deal with Singapore in case either country hits a crisis.
On prices, government was honest, not comforting. Shipping costs and world tensions are pushing prices up and Brunei cannot fully avoid that. What they can do is check prices weekly at over 100 shops and keep controls on rice, sugar, petrol, cooking oil and baby formula.
Shophouse leases got cut from 60 years to 30. Too many owners were letting old buildings fall apart for decades without fixing them.
Day 3, the big vote
The motion asking every ministry to work together better toward Wawasan 2035 passed. Every single member voted yes. Real numbers came out during the debate too, 85 percent of us should own our own home by 2035, up from 68 percent now. Water coverage is heading to 100 percent, plastic waste per person is meant to drop, recycling is meant to go up.
Day 4, AI in school and a fight over the rules
AI is officially coming into classrooms. Nearly 4,900 teachers have already been trained on it. The Education Minister was clear, AI will not replace teachers, it just helps with the boring parts. Teaching right from wrong still stays human.
A new ethics code for your LegCo representatives ran into real pushback. Members flagged that gift limits were not defined and confidentiality rules were too vague. Fair concerns.
Day 5, the ethics code gets fixed, not rushed
Instead of pushing the ethics code through half finished, it got sent back to a committee for proper review before a final vote. Even the member who wrote it agreed that was the right call. Nothing changes for your representatives right now, but a tighter version should come back eventually.
Day 6, closing numbers and closing day
14,677 people are on active welfare right now. Almost all of them, 96 percent, are able to work. Government is not forcing people off welfare into jobs, everyone’s situation is different, but they are pushing harder on training and job matching for this group.
Water leaks dropped from 45 percent to 32 percent in pilot areas, a proper fix is underway until 2029. 68.2 tonnes of old phones, laptops and electronics got recycled last year instead of dumped, if you have old electronics lying around, there are proper drop off points for that. And 279 young Bruneians went through a tech and AI startup programme this year, some already landed real investors.
Then the sitting closed. No fixed date for the next one yet.
What it all means for you
If you are waiting for a house, waiting could take a while longer, but a proper online tracking system might be coming. If you have kids, expect AI to show up in their schoolwork, and expect more honest conversations about drugs than the old poster campaigns. If you are worried about prices, government is not pretending it can fix the world, just doing what it can locally. If you rent or own a shophouse, keep your building in good shape, the free ride on old leases is over. And if you are on welfare and able to work, expect more nudging toward training and jobs, not less support outright.
Nothing here was dramatic. But taken together, this sitting was less about new promises and more about government admitting where things are stuck and putting numbers to it. That is worth something.
