Will PN do a good job with proclamation of emergency?

 

MP SPEAKS | DAP expresses surprise at the request by Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin for an emergency proclamation that will be enforced until Aug 1, when the movement control order (MCO) announced yesterday by him is only for 14 days (until Jan 26). This obvious discrepancy raises deep suspicion as to whether Muhyiddin is motivated solely by public health considerations to battle Covid-19?

Why the need for an MCO yesterday with an Emergency Proclamation today? This has caused confusion about poor governance and administration of the Perikatan Nasional government. Furthermore, the excuse given by Muhyiddin for an emergency is to overcome the call for an early general election.

Only Umno is making this demand (for early polls). All other political parties, including the opposition Pakatan Harapan and DAP, oppose the call for early general election. Therefore, it does not make sense when Umno commands only 39 out of 222 seats in Parliament.

The emergency proclamation and reimposition of the MCO after the recent surge in Covid-19 infections and deaths, show that the PN government had prematurely claimed credit last year for containing the pandemic, with Senior Minister Azmin Ali making the ridiculous claim that PN government had saved more lives than Harapan.

The time has come for PN to bear responsibility for its failure so that it can address its shortcomings to win this critical battle against the pandemic.

Policy flip-flops, double-standards and sheer incompetency by the PN government caused Malaysians to lose both our lives and livelihoods in the battle against the disease. The endless politicking for survival following Muhyiddin’s loss of parliamentary majority resulted in the PN government failing to focus on the job at hand.

Muhyiddin has not learnt the lessons from the previous round of MCO and conditional MCO imposed in March and November last year, to provide and release urgently needed funds. We can save lives by using the RM17 billion Covid fund approved in the 2021 Budget(reduced from RM38 billion in 2020) to assist our frontliners by investing in comprehensive testing, tracing and treatment to improve the health delivery system.

We can create new sources of economic growth and slow down retrenchments, job losses, business closures and save the economic livelihood of the rakyat by providing a RM45 billion economic stimulus package. This RM45 billion economic stimulus package will encompass:

• an increase in monthly welfare payments to RM1,000, including the unemployed;
• an automatic extension of the moratorium of bank loan repayments, excluding the top 20 percent, until the end of the Emergency Proclamation on Aug 1 that will help eight million Malaysian individuals and companies,
• work hiring incentives over a period of two years, under Malaysia@Work of RM500 a month to employees and RM300 per month to employers to encourage them to hire local workers, creating employment for 600,000 Malaysian workers. The unemployment rate rose from 4.7 to 4.8 percent in November 2020 when the conditional and recovery MCO was imposed;
• Digitalising education, including buying laptops, to provide online learning for students not able to attend schools (students attended only four months of schooling last year.);
• A sum of RM10 billion in financial grants should be given to provide a lifeline for new and existing businesses, loans and credit extensions, especially for the small- and medium-sized industry and the crippled tourism industry. The tourism industry lost RM100 billion in revenue last year and without “life-support” from the government, faces a bleak future.

Furthermore, the double standards and incompetency must stop. The failure to observe Covid-19 health protocols by Plantation Industries and Commodities Minister Khairuddin Aman Razali is a classic case. He was compounded only RM1,000 without being charged in court with breaking quarantine restrictions, as compared to a 72-year-old woman who was charged and fined RM8,000 and a day’s jail.

The sheer incompetency of PN is highlighted not just by its failure to come out with the SOPs for the MCO even though it had four days to prepare. Worse, is the delay in the delivery of vaccines by two months. At a time when Singapore has already taken delivery of the vaccines, our health minister is just signing agreements to purchase the vaccines.

The excuse that Malaysia did not have RM2.1 billion to purchase the vaccines is unacceptable because it is simply untrue. In cases of emergency like this, not only RM2.1 billion but RM5 billion can be made available. How many more lives will be lost unnecessarily due to the incompetency of this PN cabinet?

Will the performance of the PN government improve with an Emergency Proclamation? This is unlikely with the suspension of Parliament, when there are no longer any restraints against abuse of power, the upholding of accountability and transparency without parliamentary oversight or any checks and balances provided by the opposition.

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LIM GUAN ENG is Bagan MP, former finance minister, and former Penang chief minister. - Mkini

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.