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Tuesday, July 21, 2015

MP: WSJ report shows need for electoral reforms

There are many examples which Malaysia can adopt as part of the larger process of electoral reform.
ong-kian-min,wsj
KUALA LUMPUR: In the wake of the Wall Street Journal allegations on Friday 3 July against Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, Serdang MP Ong Kian Ming called upon him to remember the pledge he signed, prior to GE13, to carry out a comprehensive review of the elections system in Malaysia including political financing and elections-related expenditure.
“Malaysia’s poor performance in various elections related studies also refers.”
There are many examples from other countries which Malaysia can adopt as part of the larger process of electoral reform, he added. “What the country was severely lacking now was the leadership and the political will to start and carry out these much needed reforms.”
The lack of independence of the Election Commission (EC) and weak enforcement on elections spending in Malaysia was all the more glaring in the light of the allegations in the WSJ, said Ong. “Funds related to 1MDB transactions were channeled into certain accounts for the purpose of elections expenditure during the 13th General Election in 2013 including personal accounts under the name of Najib.”
In the Money, Politics and Transparency (MPT) study, he said, the oversight over campaign finance was described as follows:
“The Electoral Commission is responsible for overseeing political finance. In law, the Commission is not granted investigatory powers. Its appointees are not appointed based on merit, and their independence, in practice, is not fully guaranteed. The body does not conduct investigations, lacks the capacity to do so, and never imposes sanctions on parties or candidates who violate the law. In Malaysia, not only is the regulatory framework fairly weak, enforcement is less than rigorous.”
Malaysia’s ranking on the MPT Study on political financing shows, he stressed, “that we are in dire need of campaign finance reform”.
On 16 July, the MPT project, a joint initiative between the Sunlight Foundation, Global Integrity and the Electoral Integrity Project, released a new dataset comprising of their findings on elections law and elections spending, he cited.
Out of the 54 countries in the study, he noted, Malaysia was ranked No. 50 scoring 19 points out of a possible 100.
Malaysia’s score was lower than that of Indonesia (47 points), Bangladesh (41 points) and Nigeria (29 points).
Malaysia’s poor score in this study was consistent with other studies which look at the electoral process in Malaysia, he said. The Electoral Integrity Project (one of the initiators of the MPT project) had earlier ranked Malaysia 114 out of 127 in terms of electoral integrity.
The issue of transparency in elections expenditure and political financing was not something new. It was one of the eight demands of Bersih 2.0.
Transparency International Malaysia (TI-M) has also been consistently advocating for political financing reform and published a comprehensive book with concrete proposals for political financing reform in Malaysia.
The Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) has been talking about political financing reform since 2012.
Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, Paul Low, has also been advocating for greater transparency in political financing since he became a member of the Cabinet.

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