Of lame duck and clowns
Sim Kwang Yang
Now that parliamentarians are going to be given a 10% increase in their remuneration, the role of our elected representatives has suddenly become media focus.
As one letter writer to malaysiakini puts it, he wants to get his money’s worth. He is a taxpayer who pays for the increase in MP allowance. As a towkay, whenever employees ask for a raise, he wants to know the justification for such a demand. For a start, he wants the parliamentary proceedings to be televised live, so at least the voters will know what goes on inside that august chamber sitting a stone’s throw away from Kuala Lumpur city centre.
This view of our legislators is a common one among Malaysians.
Perhaps, living and working in our capitalist market economy for so long has conditioned many citizens to consider every human relationship as that of a commercial exchange, including that between legislators and the electorate at large.
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Nevertheless, the metaphor of the business world as applied to the political domain cannot be pushed too far, without incurring the risk of reducing politics to a mere business venture. Members of Parliament are not there for their remuneration principally – at least they ought not be so. Their function is surely more than that of employees working for a boss.
The transgression in categorical boundary in the use of the business metaphor would seem to be inevitable in our Malaysian context though.
After all, most informed educated voters know the close connection between vested business interests and political power at various levels of the government. I suspect they have accepted this as a brute fact within an unalterable framework of reality, to which no alternative and no other possibility exists. That is politics, they will tell you.
The ‘commercial’ vote
So, whenever they are asked for their votes and political support once every five years, they see that rare chance in their political life to demand something in return, usually in the form of development projects, stability, donation for their local temples and churches, a bigger culvert to drain away waste water from their housing estate, and so on. When all these requests fail for one reason or another, the least that the voters can demand is “service” from their YB.
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After all, those election candidates do swear on the name of their mother to “serve” the people with all their heart and soul, if they get elected. They ought to mean “service” to the nation, the constitution and the King, as is implied in their oath of office. Well, if their electorate take “service” to mean personal attention to individual voters on solving individual problems, so be it – as long as pledges bring in votes. Like money is a medium of exchange for goods and services, the vote has also become a sort of commercial exchange between politicians and their constituents. The noble precess of politics has become just another business transaction.
Gradually, voters have, by and large, come to their criterion for judging the performance of a YB. In theory at least, the principle sounds noble enough. The wakil rakyat must be a man - or a woman - close to the people, who shows concern for the people’s problems, and is ready to lend a helping hand at all hours of the day. The worse condemnation of an election candidate is that he has never been seen in his constituency, and is visible shaking hands with Tom, Dick and Harry only on election eve, once every five years.
There is nothing wrong in this expectation of elected representatives within any parliamentary democracy, in theory. The constituency is an MP’s power base. He should have a significant presence among his electorates, by having an office easily accessible and well known to his voters. In theory, he should know at all times what is going on in all corners of his constituency. His chance of getting elected depends heavily on his contact with his voters at large.
Serving the people
Unfortunately, like most noble ideas in politics, the concept of “serving the people” has become distorted in the twists and turns of our democratic evolution. For a start, getting elected again and garnering votes have become the end-all and be-all of political life, for individual Members of Parliament and the various state assemblies as well as their party bosses.
Some politicians on both sides of the political divide have really carried this idea of servicing their voters to extreme. The usual routine is of course to look at blocked drains and pot-holes, and to preside over various opening ceremonies. Others will make sure they always arrive first on the scene of a fire or a flood.
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It does not matter that they are completely powerless in putting out a fire, or stemming a flash flood. All it matters that they must be seen to be with the people in their moment of anguish. Miraculously, the press photographers will always appear at about the same time to capture such spirit of public dedication by the people’s representatives!
In short, a Member of Parliament is reduced to the role of a social worker, a petition writer, and a public servant, all rolled into one. A BN candidate whom I defeated confided to me once that often he felt no better than a prostitute! Another long-serving BN MP told me he had to donate a couple of hundreds of coffins for the poor over his long tenure in his rural constituency!
The fat YB
In another extreme case, another BN YB I know of, did not even have to do any of the above servicing. He just attended dinners, sometimes up to four or five dinners every night of the week. With well over a hundred Chinese guilds and associations, and an even greater number of temples in his constituency, there was no shortage of dinner invitations. He got re-elected many times on the strength of his gastronomical solidarity to the people, and became very fat.
Wakil rakyat may have been elected with the help of party financing, and generous donations from supporters. But for this strange business of servicing the constituency (like servicing a car?), they have to depend on their own resources. For those who have not secured fat contracts or lucrative posts to supplement their income, and therefore relying solely on their allowance for their political survival, they can be very broke indeed!
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Even so, if asked what is the most urgent task for an MP, they will tell you that servicing their constituency remains at the very top of their priority. Those with long memory will remind you of the great success of the legendary Lee Lam Thye (picture) - dubbed the Father of Street Hawkers - who got re-elected many times with enviable majorities of votes in Kuala Lumpur, precisely because of this public image he created of being a servant of the people on a 24/7 basis par excellence.
They will also most likely tell you that how you perform in Parliament is almost insignificant. Most of the time, the voters wouldn’t care two hoots about what goes on in Parliament anyway, and the meager skimpy parliamentary reportage carried by the press reflects and feeds this general apathy about parliamentary proceedings among the people at large.
Like many of our crucial political institutions, the parliament enjoys more formal ceremonial distinction than substantive efficacy in the life of the ordinary people. When was the last time that anything of great note was decided by the parliament on its own steam, to change the destiny of the people and alter the course of our history for the better..
The qualifying phrase “on its own steam” is important. The power that drives the parliament does not come from that supposedly august institution itself, for all along, for the nearly half a century of its existence, its agenda, its legislative precesses, its language of deliberation and its house standing orders, have always been dictated by the executive branch of government.
Neither motivation nor room
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In substance, the parliament is very much like an administrative subsidiary under the jurisdiction of the Prime Minister’s Department. This is particularly clear in money matters. Even the MP’s remuneration comes out of the coffer of the Accountant General under the Finance Ministry, rather than from the Parliament’s independent account.
In terms of pay, Members of Parliament are treated like a kind of high grade civil servants. Their job is to pass laws put forth by the government, without hindrance, and without causing too much trouble. Is it any wonder, therefore, that our Yang Berhormat either keeps golden silence throughout their term of tenure, reads out prepared texts like a talking robot once a year, or mutters sheer nonsense at times for a spot of fun to kill the suffocating boredom of the regimented proceeding in the House.
In short, there is neither motivation nor room for Members of Parliament to perform their proper function in the House. Having live television coverage now would wake them up a little, but it will not change matters much. It will certainly not give those business-minded voters their money’s worth, if only they also know the value, and not just the price of things..
Eventually, the ineffectiveness of the Members of Parliament is a symptom of the sickness that has festered within our parliamentary democracy since independence. Things will change over time of course - perhaps over a very long period of time.
For instance, Parliament will be of crucial importance to the people when a vote of no confidence in the government or the prime minister is tabled and nearly carried. That would make the entire country sit up and rediscover the useful existence of this the allegedly highest political institution of the land.
For that, we need a credible opposition party or an opposition alliance playing the role of government-in-waiting. Judging from the performance of the current opposition parties now, we may have to put up with a lame duck parliament filled with clownish members for many decades to come.
