[plesner]

How much of a politician's time is taken up by making public statements of the type this kind of legislation covers? At least for someone in power, surely only a small part.

If we can't trust politicians to tell the truth in public statements then that's the smaller problem. The bigger problem is: what are they doing the rest of the time when not in public? What kinds of decisions are they making and how are they exercising power? Being a liar and being a terrible leader goes hand in hand. This gives the impression of doing something useful when the best case scenario is that awful people can continue to exercise power, they just have to be a bit more careful what they say in public.

The real question is, how do you prevent terrible people from ending up in positions of power. But avoiding that requires changing how people come to power which nobody in power wants to do. So we get red herrings like this instead.