Pakatan Lies Galore
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Malaysiakini – OSA, classified CEP report contradict Harapan’s pledge for full transparency:
Civil society strongly protests the prime minister’s decision to keep the Council of Eminent Persons (CEP) 100-day report secret simply by saying it is the government’s business.
He has also announced that the Official Secrets Act 1972 (OSA) will stay despite the Pakatan Harapan coalition’s promised revision prior to GE14.
This is in total contradiction to the new government’s commitment to total transparency during the exposés of the Najib Abdul Razak administration just after the May elections.
Refusal to be complicit
NGOs like Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Suaram) that submitted their reports to the Institutional Reforms Committee (IRC) certainly want their submissions to be made public so that the public knows that we are not complicit in the new government’s reneging on their GE14 promises.
Since the May elections, many of our human rights demands have not been met and these include not just the OSA but also detention-without-trial laws, the Sedition Act 1948, child marriages, harassment of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer (LGBTQ) community and the violations of indigenous peoples’ rights.
If the Harapan government does not make the CEP report public, the people may think that the government acted on our recommendations. Thus, I would like to suggest that the Harapan government releases the IRC report since it was submitted separately to the CEP.
CEP’s reputation at stake
The old BN government used to say that the OSA was needed for national security. Now, the new Harapan government says that submissions to the CEP are “sensitive” and that some businesses may suffer.
Really? Does it justify PKR vice-president Rafizi Ramli’s charges under the OSA then since he wasn’t sensitive enough to the health of the corporation he was exposing? After the cows and condos scandal he raised to deserve the charges under the OSA, he might well say, “What a load of bullocks!”
The CEP needs to be reminded that they will be held culpable in Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s recent decisions, which are not just contradictory to the Harapan manifesto but look like the repeat of Mahathir 1.0.
These include the announcement that sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional will be privatised for bumiputera interests and the new national car project Proton 2.0.
Presumably, the prime minister was advised by his Council of Eminent Persons on these decisions. If not, how are we to know when the CEP report is kept secret? I am afraid they will have to live with their tarnished reputation.
