Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin was reported yesterday as saying that the government will consider Tan Sri Joseph Kurup’s, the Unity and National Integration Minister, recent proposal to remove the ‘race’ categories from all official forms.
I must however point out that this is not something that is new or novel because Muhyiddin had in fact openly mooted the same idea on 18 August 2009 and I had brought up the matter in Parliament in December of the same year (refer the 2-page attachment).
The then Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Liew Vui Keong, had given a written reply to my question in Parliament that there are a few reasons why the column for race was still necessary in government forms. One reason was that the information was needed for statistic purpose while another was the information was required by the law enforcement authorities. The written reply also mentioned the fact that in Australia, UK and US, race identification was required in certain documents due to “equal opportunities monitoring”.
From August 2009 till the present, the BN government has left this issue on the back burner. Could it be that BN pull this ‘race categories’ issue out again as a political trick to swing votes ahead of the coming Kajang by-election? Perhaps certain politicians would only portray themselves as beyond the whole race thing whenever there is an election.
Certainly the government’s inaction from August 2009 till now is a clear indicator that BN has never been really serious in doing away with race identification.
However, I have two suggestions for the government. The first is that if the ‘race categories’ cannot be omitted in all government forms due to technicality, then it should be an optional category in the forms so that Malaysians can have a choice whether to fill it in or not and anyone who does not fill it in will not be jeopardised in any manner. My second suggestion is to include the category of ‘Malaysian’ as one of the race categories. This is for those who are rather to be known as Malaysians than being identified based on race or ethnicity.