I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the sordid state that the parliamentary debates have become. It would be terribly comical and funny, if it had not been so tragic!
This is how real parliamentary debates ought to look like:
**More women in parliament, please! Good ol' Mags, wotta trooper**
Politicians have a DUTY to their constituents to know exactly the issues which concern their constituents and be well-prepared to debate issues in a constructive manner. The Malaysian Parliament's shit slinging and name calling is childish and alarming -- it highlights the gross incompetency of Malaysian MPs.
Malaysia is a country led by a parliament largely composed of incompetent individuals posessing of no standards whatsoever. Uncivilised, uneducated and uncouth.
The ability to respond to insults and deflect negative attention in a graceful way is the hallmark of a great statesman, the existence of which happens to be a factual impossibility in the Malaysian Parliament. Search at the end of a rainbow you just might find him/her behind a pot of gold.
What has become of the democratic processes so fundamental to a sovereign, self-governing nation that exists by the mandate of the people? The answer is undoubtedly dismal. We shall all languish in the abysmal pit of institutional inertia, unable to move backward, paralysed from moving forward -- a country whose elected representatives repeatedly disappoint, and let down their constituents.
Politicians forget that they only exist for the benefit of their electorate. Tragically, most often end up pursuing their own interests or the perceived interests of their electorate, which are often horribly maligned and skewed from reality.
A healthy democratic parliament ought to be in agreement on at least the most basic and fundamental constitutional principles that underpin the very nation itself.
This means that fundamental constitutional issues such as human rights, judicial independence and government accountability -- which are absolute and cannot be compromised -- are not to be sidelined in the interests of debating and ocassionally cat-fighting over the divisive "race" issue.
The divisive "race issue" is a problem that parliament has created for itself. The Reid Commission only recommended a social contract with a recommendation for a limitation period of 15 years whereupon such a contract will be up for review. (NB: I've used parliament here -- but more appropriately this is because of the parliamentary majority -- the government/ruling party effectively exercises the legislative functions anyway).
Having allowed the problem to fester for more than 3 generations, parliament has created a mess that if left unchecked, will surely cripple the nation in the next decade or so. The lacklustre economy, and the increasing inability of the country to catch up with industrialised peers like South Korea, and the rapidly developing Taiwan, Thailand and the Phillippines are all proof of the inability of the country to attract and retain talent for the development of the knowledge industries required to elevate Malaysia from a third-world developing nation to that of an industrialised nation.
Clearly we are far from achieving that goal.
We should all drink deeply from the cup of nihilism and surrender to the inevitable.
The state of the Malaysian parliamentary debates leaves much to be desired:
It is a common joke amongst law students from time immemorial that a parliamentary hansard is a great sedative, especially when one suffers from acute insomnia. The napkin with some scribbled notes in the subcommittee chambers is likely to have greater value in ascertaining legislative intent than an entire tome of Hansard for the week.
Nothing of the sort is to be said for the Malaysian Hansard, however. There has been more drama, shit slinging and catty insults in a single, titillating volume of the Malaysian Hansard than there has been and ever will be in England's similarly titled record of parliamentary debates for the past four hundred years and beyond.
Still not convinced? Watch more:
The Chair, for one -- is completely incapable of controlling the excesses of the speakers who take the floor. He appears not to have any clue whatsoever on what constitutes the appropriate rules of procedure, lapsing into bouts of amnesia on the rules of procedure whenever members from the ruling party take liberties in using colourful euphemisms in the course of debating. However, when members of the opposition take the floor, they are quickly cut off and chastised for even failing to exactly repeat the honorifics of whichever MP they happen to be addressing in their speech. He only intervenes when it gets extremely out of hand and the threat of physical assault is imminent.
[In Malaysian society, honorifics are conferred titles that are generally earned, but more easily obtained through the making of financial contributions to an aristocratic member of one of the 9 sultanates. Indeed, a tidy living could be made out of the "conferment" of such titles. More pertinently however, it is possible to amass so much titles that it could take up to a full minute to pronounce a person's complete honorifics].
I take particular offence with the rude and sexist remarks made against opposition women MPs in these debates. Considering that the parliamentary fora is publicly televised on national TV, they not only destroy the credibility of those being spoken of, it destroys the credibility of the speaker, and the credibility of the Parliament as a whole.
And yet, these self-righteous MPs are determined to persist in this idiocy. Making fools of themselves, their country and the very institutions in which they swore to uphold. Oh the shame!! I have never been more ashamed to have been born as a Malaysian.
In the age of such immense resources for connectivity and accessibility -- everything you say can and will be recorded (and worse, within a matter of hours, made live for all the world to see). Your ugliness, in all its glory - within a matter of seconds, news servers, web crawlers and ISP servers will pick everything up, cache, and load the information up again and again 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000x in the blink of an eye for all the world to see.
No mount of caterwauling, complaining, wailing or rhetoricising will reverse anything that's out on the internet, as Paris Hilton can testify so vehemently to (of course, it is highly debatable whether she really wanted the information to remain confidential -- it seems to have benefited her more greatly than any detriment it might have caused).
Politicians are stupid, everyone knows that -- but I've never realised how incredibly STUPID Malaysian politicians are, in general.
I'm absolutely, flabbergasted, rendered nauseated by the number of self-serving, status-seeking, power-hungry politicians that inundate the Malaysian parliament today.
There are two types of politicians (more, perhaps, but it's too late in the night for me to devise up every single conceivable category of human behaviour).
Firstly, the sort that have more passion than sense - their passion leads them to persist in arguing endlessly about "issues" that will does not advance the interests of the nation by even a single iota - all fruitless and ineffective endeavours that get us no further than where we have begun. This renders their leadership grossly ineffective or in some cases, even dangerously so.
What this means is that when these incredibly single-minded politicians get particularly attached to a certain doctrinal position or stance on an issue -- they can be deadly. By wielding the incredible power of speech, the backing of their masses and through continuous reiteration of such "issues", these politicians (whether rightly or wrongly, conciously or otherwise) end up leading their followers toward a futile, self-destructive course -- right into the abyss. These are politicians who zoom in on specific "touchy" issues -- pursue them to the bitter end -- only to find that these issues open a pandora's box of evils that does nothing but bring more strife and grief to a nation already saddled with issues like corruption and lacklustre economy. The bottomline: Do not open the can of worms, unless you are convinced of its benefit to the greater good and are prepared to face the consequences in doing so.
Secondly, the sort that have too much craftiness and selfishness to be effective leaders. These people are machiavellian, to say the least -- their main aim is not to aid society in achieving the greater good, or even to improve the lot of their constitutents. They mayhave begun their political career with such an aim in mind, but through the effluxion of time, become increasingly motivated by power, recognition and wealth -- and become self-serving agents that are more concerned with protecting, consolidating and advancing their personal influence than actually doing anything positive in the interests of the greater good.
In times of economic prosperity, the self-serving interests of these machiavellian agents might not necessarily be contrary to the interests of the greater good, typically because in times of wealth, such are abundantly available, everyone wins, and there is enough of the pie to go around - such agents tend to be staking out their territories less (due to the level of rivalry being relatively low). In such times, these agents may not even neccessarily be completely machiavellian and may even feel somewhat altruistic and benevolent, and may temporarily display behaviours more commonly associated with the first type of politicians. (NB: Note however that the categorisation is not meant to be comprehensive, nor exhaustive even). In times of dampened economic growth, consequently, machiavellian agents quickly revert to protecting themselves and their interests. This becomes rather obvious when observing parliamentary debates. It has become extremely common to observe useless and inept politicians bandy words about in a meaningless, roundabout fashion, having arrived at parliamentary sessions not having even the barest understanding of the issues which they are directly responsible for. In short, these politicians are lazy buggers.
In contrast, NZ politicians have refined parliamentary session politicking into a very subtle art. The machiavellian ones are not without morals and ethics, unlike Malaysian politicians. This is not to say that they do not bandy about words in a roundabout fashion, for all politicians do that -- but rather -- not deflecting attention by playing the old "blame game" and engaging in ugly, barbaric, mud slinging, but rather adeptly diverting attention away from negatives by turning it into positives.
In other words, Malaysian politics is ugly, uncivilised and uncouth. The very stench of it is nauseating to the point of repugnance.
Therefore, in summation:
Politics is a genteel art. Learn to insult people in a way that it almost sounds like you're praising them.
Democracy is not for all men, it is only for those with enough candour to speak frankly and to allow others to do likewise.
In other words, democracy tends to favour the educated (a sad, but too terribly true fact).
Democracy is not a simple concept to understand.
Third world and developing countries are just not ready for democracy.
Politicians talk through their asses - especially the lazy ones.
Constituents - Do not vote for lazy politicians - they do not deserve to lead you.
Constituents - Do NOT applaud the insipidity and disrespect shown by your MPs when they sling shit around as brave or heroic, etc. You won't stand being talked to like that, why should you expect some other MP to?
