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Let’s March Onwards

‘Abiding Times’, theSun, 6 March 2009

I’VE been getting emails from friends who intend to ‘celebrate’ 8 March on Sunday, but I think the appropriate gesture would be merely to reflect upon what’s happened since that date in 2008.

I was grateful for 8 March. I had recently returned from Washington DC at a time when the presidential race was heating up there, and before that I spent several years learning and working in London’s Westminster Village (the area encompassing the Houses of Parliament, the most influential think tanks and government ministries). I was optimistic that 8 March would lead to an increasing quality of policy output in Malaysia, or at least a reform of the process of policymaking. In my first piece for theSun, I wrote that parliament and the federation could be the biggest winners of the elections, and that it would facilitate moving towards a politics of ideas.

In the first few weeks, even months, this seemed to be a real possibility. The voices of change from the triumphant Opposition were being joined by voices of reform from the reassessing Government. For the first time ever there was competition between political parties on the promise of change. But this trajectory towards utopia was short-lived. Events transpired which brought to the fore the classically provocative issues of race and religion, and a nitrous injection was provided by scandals and character assassinations. Inevitably, this triggered irrational defence mechanisms and as a result, the politics of patronage and patronisation became all too relevant again.

“A more productive two-party system is one in which the moderates of the parties are dominant on their respective benches, and the competition is based on capturing the centre ground.”

We see the continual hardening of emotions today in the unremitting Perak imbroglio, where supporters of both sides flatly refuse to entertain the possibility that they were in the wrong in the first place (either for fielding unreliable candidates to begin with, or for losing and then acquiring power through, at best, questionable methods). The effectiveness of the quality control checks in the appointment of the Heads of Government in Perak, Selangor, Terengganu and Perlis by their Heads of State following the elections have unfortunately led the politicians to feel the need to invoke the Rulers in an attempt to legitimise party political actions.

This partisanship for its own sake could be healthy in one respect in that it lays the lines for two-party politics, but it does little for improving the quality of policymaking. Whipping backbenchers to toe the party line may get clean results during votes in the Dewan but it stultifies independent thinking, and independent thinking is what we need in a time of economic crisis and political transition to get the maximum number of views (I know for a fact that there are MPs on both sides opposed to a huge unrestrained economic stimulus package which will condemn our future taxpaying prospects, but their party leaders seem to be calling for increased figures every time I read the papers). Detailed scrutiny and debate of each line of bills are what legislatures are for, but it seems that the functions of hypothetical parliamentary committees still only occur in Putrajaya with stakeholders of the government’s own choosing on its own terms.

A more productive two-party system is one in which the moderates of the parties are dominant on their respective benches, and the competition is based on capturing the centre ground which comprises the majority of Malaysians. Regardless of almost every demographic indicator, the majority of Malaysian families have many of the same ambitions that you and I have—a quality education for their children, enough food on the table, a transportation network that gets them to work and back and home for the holidays, and enough time left over to exercise and enjoy entertainment without judgement from self-appointed moral guardians (and both sides certainly have plenty of those). Instead, the incessant politicking for its own sake has forestalled progress and weakened our democratic institutions.

I hear that one recurring criticism of my column is that I’ve been over-optimistic from the get-go (dreaming that all MPs would get Parliament-issued BlackBerrys and a vastly increased research allowance, for instance). Well it is quite deliberate, if only to demonstrate the extent to which features that are standard in other Westminster democracies are ludicrously distant here. Pleasantly for us, more and more individuals and organisations from inside and outside the country are supporting the mission of the Malaysia Think Tank to fly the kite of freedom and strengthen democracy as envisioned in our Proclamation of Independence. We even now have politicians from the five biggest parties in the Dewan Rakyat on board, so that they and their allies can help reinvigorate the march towards capturing the centre through healthy competition.