There were a few unprecedented activities which took place in parliament this morning.
Firstly, the full order paper was not given to the MPs or uploaded to the parliament website until it was past 10am.
Secondly, when the full order paper was released, it was clearly stated that the date of tabling (‘tarikh dibentangkan’) for the Delimitation Exercise Report was the 22nd of March 2018.
The note in the front cover of the Delimitation Exercise states that this report should be embargoed until this report is tabled in parliament, which is today, the 22nd of March, 2018.
But instead of allowing lawmakers to study this report in detail and to make this report available to the press and the public, the speaker, Tan Sri Pandikar made an absolutely ludicrous ruling by saying that the embargo is to be extended until the 28th of March 2018 which is when the delimitation exercise will be tabled for the 1st reading. In addition, the speaker also said that MPs are not allowed to even read the contents of the report![1] This is unprecedented in Malaysia parliamentary history where an official document which has already been tabled is under embargo for 6 days. Even the speech by the Minister of Finance and the yearly budget documents are only embargoed for a few hours which is the time period before the budget is formally presented in parliament by the Mininster of Finance.
This coincidence of these events – the late uploading and distribution of today’s order paper as well as the ludicrous decision by the speaker to embargo the delimitation report for 6 days – leads me to suspect that they have been carried out with the underlying reason of denying public access to these documents by the plaintiffs of two court cases against the Election Commission (EC) based on the delimitation exercise.
The first case, filed by Ivy Josiah and 3 others on the 8th of March 2018, which is before the EC handed over its report to the Prime Minister on the 9th of March 2018, will be heard on the 28th of March, 2018. The second case, filed by Maria Chin and 107 others, was filed on the 20th of March and will be heard on the 23rd of March, 2018.[2] If the contents of the delimitation exercise are still embargoed up to the 28th of March, 2018, then it is likely that the plaintiffs in both of these cases won’t be able to refer to the delimitation exercise in their respective court cases.
These actions raise the possibility that the office of the Speaker of the Malaysian parliament, the Election Commission and Prime Minister’s office are acting in concert in order to push through this unfair and undemocratic delimitation exercise so that the BN can gain yet another electoral advantage in the upcoming 14th general elections.
I call upon the Speaker to immediately lift the embargo so that not only will MPs be able to read this report but that the press and the public can have access to this report so that they can determine for themselves if this is one of the most undemocratic and unfair delimitation exercises in Malaysian history.