“Wouldn’t it show Pakatan Rakyat was more serious if it can come to a consensus on who would be ministers?” a young man asked at a public forum here last night that was meant to discuss what it means to be Malaysian.
The DAP’s publicity chief, Tony Pua, bore the brunt of the growing demand from the increasingly discerning urban voters.
Pua explained that the DAP-PKR-PAS alliance did not need to appoint a single “pointman” to act as a check-and-balance to each ministerial portfolio occupied by the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) and hold the front-benchers accountable.
It did not appear to go down well with the largely Chinese crowd, numbering some 150 people.
Pua said PR lacked human resources, but this only served to raise the crowd's hackles.
“As to whether we pinpoint a person to be pointman for finance, for trade… I’m not sure if that really matters. A lot of people feel it is important but I don’t feel so,” said Pua, who is also Petaling Jaya Utara MP.
The Oxford-educated first-term legislator’s brush-off appeared to rub some members of the audience the wrong way.
Another young man, who identified himself as Andrew Pang, fairly bristled at Pua’s statement that PR assigned specific portfolios to focus on because it lacked the resources to scrutinise each and every ministerial section.
“How are you selecting the portfolios?” Pang pressed Pua, quizzing the latter on PR’s system to decide which portfolios were more important and which less important.
“You need to be more transparent. Have integrity,” Pang chastised.
He was rejoined by an older man who said he was “appalled” that Pua had blamed a lack of resources for PR’s reluctance to name its potential line-up.
The anonymous man claimed he used to be a political aide and was familiar with the workings of Parliament. He ticked off Pua for making excuses to hide PR’s flaws.
“If you say no resources, it’s by choice. By the sin of omission, you had deprived yourself of resources that would have helped form the shadow Cabinet,” the man charged, calling attention to the lack of non-government activists on board local councils.
PKR’s rising star and Selangor economist Rafizi Ramli tried to deflect the focus by pointing out that the “shadow Cabinet” concept was modeled on the British Westminster model and was not the only method to check each ministerial portfolio occupied by the ruling BN and hold the front-benchers accountable.
“Going by the Westminster model… to hold every ministry accountable… it can be a waste. The approach taken currently, to assign a portfolio to a committee is working quite well,” Rafizi said.
“That’s why Parliament’s been working quite well in the past two years,” he added, highlighting the number of exposes on leakages and abuse of public funds.
The audience that night did not appear to buy the explanations, going by their subdued response.
