Senate's devaluation due to perversion, argues senator

Recent public debate on the inutility of the Senate, leading in one instance to a call for the Upper House's abolishment, has not drawn a sympathetic echo from one of the present chamber's more cerebral members.

This is not because senator Syed Husin Ali, nominated for a second three-year term last December by the Selangor Pakatan Rakyat government, does not share the widespread view that the Senate has become a backdoor to ministerial ranks by electoral failures, a dumping ground of sorts for politicians unable to get gain legitimate entry into Parliament through the ballot box.

Syed Husin agrees with the popular view that the supposedly august body has been shorn of the utility assigned it by the constitution, but he ascribes the decline to perversion of a vitalising set of criteria for entry to the chamber.

"Our diagnosis of its decline must not just dwell on the symptoms but on its deeper causes," offered the former PKR deputy president and former dean of the Department of Social Anthropology at Universiti Malaya.

"The Senate's derogation is the fault of those empowered to nominate its members who ignore the guidelines in the constitution that require almost half the body to be composed of persons of distinction in their respective professions and of representatives of ethnic minorities," Syed Husin elaborated.

"The criteria for selection to half the chamber has been wholly ignored and in recent decades given over to political rejects and hangers-on who do nothing to elevate the debate and sharpen the deliberations on bills and laws that come before the body," he added.

Senate seen as 'rubbish dump'

Syed Husin said the constitutional allocation of half the seats in the Senate to distinguished members of the professions was wise because "you need the knowledge and experience of these experts on a gamut of issues that affect the well-being of the people."

"Society needs the disinterested interested professional as much as it needs the necessarily partisan politician," opined the long-time academician-cum-politician.

Syed Husin defined the ‘disinterested interested professional' as someone who will give an opinion on a matter on which he or she has gained expertise in a way that is unaffected by the taint of his or her pecuniary interest.

"The more abundantly available is this type of opinion to a society, the more civilised is that society reckoned to be because the objective perception of value is the mark of civilised society," he argued.

"That is why, I think, the constitution accorded almost half the seats in the Senate to people of distinction in the professions but the allocation has been perverted for the use of political hacks, apple polishers and hangers-on.

"Hence the popular perception of the Senate as a rubbish dump and a rubber stamp," remarked Syed Husin.

"It was constitutionally not configured to be that way," he sighed.