Najib: Divided Pakatan dare not announce shadow Cabinet

(The Malaysian Insider) – Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak today challenged the opposition to reveal its shadow Cabinet to strengthen of the country’s two-party system.

He said Pakatan Rakyat (PR) was afraid to announce its shadow minister line-up as they were not united and could not agree on how to divide up key portfolios among its three component parties.

“They dare not. They do not how, what to offer. What position to offer to Haji Hadi (Awang). If you have problems with Haji Hadi, where do you put Mat Sabu? You put him as the shadow education minister? Disaster awaits,” he said of PAS’s top two leaders at the “Malaysian Chinese at the Political Crossroads” conference here.

“So really, it is a motley collection of parties and individuals who shouldn’t really inspire confidence in the public. But because they have demonised us ad nauseam… people sometimes do not see through all this.”

PR set up “shadow committees” in 2009 but has so far declined to pick its shadow Cabinet despite repeated calls from civil society groups, claiming it would be too resource-heavy.

Najib also criticised opposition parties for allegedly lacking sincerity, and claimed PR was only good at talking about ideals but not practising them.

He questioned how democratic PKR was, given that its de facto leader, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, had not been elected to his post, while his wife was the president and their daughter, a vice president.

DAP was equally guilty of not walking the talk, the BN president added, claiming that the majority-Chinese party often played the race card despite professing to be multiracial.

“Is DAP really a multi-racial party? You ask the Malays in Penang, is DAP a multi-racial party. They will say some words that [aren’t] exactly the best of the English vocabulary,” he said.

“When they campaign, it’s a kind of whispering campaign. And we know when they whisper in the ears of the Chinese, they whisper something else… They play that (race) card.”