Penang PH’s unseemly zeal

FMT:

Penang PH’s unseemly zeal

In barring two Bersatu ‘non-hoppers’ from the state assembly, Pakatan Harapan is being overly zealous.




From Terence Netto


If discretion is the better part of valour, then restraint can be said to be a noble feature of strength.

Pakatan Harapan’s Penang chapter should not have had to flex its muscles obtusely in the state assembly on Monday by voting to vacate four seats held by the opposition on grounds their occupants were guilty of party hopping.

True, the four seats were won on an opposition coalition’s ticket at the 2018 general election but two of the victors were originally from then PH component, Bersatu.

The two stayed with the same party through the turmoil caused by a rash of party hopping in early 2020.

The phenomenon stoked public ire and caused political instability, eventuating in a change to the composition of the federal government in March 2020.

The ructions heightened public pressure in support of legislation to bar party hopping.

In 2022, the government of then prime minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob bowed to this pressure and shepherded a recondite law barring party hopping through Parliament.

The PH state government in Penang, which had legislated against party hopping as far back as 2012, was keen to implement the law against reps elected in the 2018 general election who subsequently changed their party affiliations.

But two of the four reps, though with altered corporate affiliations, contrived to stay in the same party (Bersatu) from which they contested the 2018 general election.

The duo was not transparently transgressive of the party hopping law Parliament passed in 2022 unlike the two reps who were originally from PKR but later switched to Bersatu.

This pair that switched from PKR to Bersatu were patently party hoppers.

By forcing the originally Bersatu pair that stayed put in the same party to vacate their seats when they were not so self-evidently party hoppers was akin to gilding the lily and then shredding it.

It is one thing to have the strength of a giant, which PH enjoys in the Penang state assembly with 33 out of 40 seats, but it is altogether a different thing to use that strength like a bully.

The occasion called for magnanimity, not tyranny.



Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.