Let us advance efforts to establish a people-centric government

Christmas celebrates the blessings of peace, prosperity, forgiveness and salvation. Similarly, a people-centric government can also bring peace and prosperity based on the principles of truth, freedom, justice, democracy and integrity.

For this reason, DAP urges the BN Federal government to allow the use of the word Allah on the Bahasa Malaysia version of the Bible as has been allowed in Sabah and Sarawak for the last 50 years and practiced in the Middle East for more than a thousand years. Further, BN should stop using the fear tactics of a Christian state to frighten Malay voters to support BN when Christians have never sought a Christian state but instead pledged loyalty to the Federal Constitution that Islam is the religion of Malaysia.

Although principles and idealism has been dismissed by some irresponsible quarters as incompatible with running a government, a people-centric government can be both principled but practical, idealistic and yet realistic. For example, implementing open competitive tenders is not only idealistic but now a realistic component that contributed towards some of Penang’s achievements.

This lack of faithfulness to principles has shown how impractical it is to the public as highlighted by three recent major issues of public interest, namely the threat of Lynas rare earth plant on the health and safety of the rakyat, the privatisation of enforcement by allowing private companies to profit from the traffic summons issued and the RM 871 billion illicit outflow of dirty money scandal over the last 10 years.

A people-centric government would never allow these projects that put profits over people. Further these projects would never pass the integrity test, as accountability and transparency would quickly expose the lies, injustice and cronies who benefit most at the expense of public interest.

Let us advance efforts to establish a people-centric government based on integrity that gives preference to people over profits to put a stop to any future Lynas rare earth plant, Automated Enforcement System(AES) and RM 871 billion illicit outflow of dirty money scandals.