Khalid had few answers to the criticisms raised against his administration’s failings. — file pic
SHAH ALAM, Sept 29 — Recalcitrant civil servants, resistant party members, and race.
These are the recurring obstacles to reforms that the Pakatan Rakyat (PR) Selangor government must eliminate, said academicians, activists and state government officials at a recent book launch.
Mentri Besar Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim, the event’s special guest, went beyond agreeing that these factors were mainly to blame for the disappointments in his administration’s more than two-year track record.
In responding to the criticisms levelled at his administration, Khalid alluded to fact that these factors would continue to hobble his government and that there was no sure way to deal with them.
“Our policies may be good. But implementation is hard. The obstacles are hard and are no joke,” Khalid stressed at the launch of “Road to Reform: Pakatan Rakyat in Selangor”.
The book is a collection of essays from 22 prominent members of Malaysia’s civil society movements — including academicians, writers, environmentalists, journalists and legal activists.
The pieces deal with specific Selangor government policies introduced by PR, which tried to break with the past practices of Barisan Nasional (BN) administrations.
The book looked at the challenges, pitfalls and victories in PR’s quest to establish a more transparent, accountable, inclusive and efficient state government. It was edited by Selangor government research officer Tricia Yeoh.
Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan, who spoke at the launch, brought up an oft-mentioned PR promise that had yet to be fulfilled: Reintroducing local council elections.
This was also brought up by some in the audience, one of whom snidely remarked that PR did not really want the third vote as the coalition would lose control of local councils.
State governments currently get to appoint councillors and the posts are sometimes used to reward loyalists.
“It is something do-able. There are legal arguments that can be made for it and it is envisaged in the Constitution. The Selangor government must re-introduce them,” said Ambiga, the chairperson of election watch-dog Bersih 2.0.
Khalid chose not to respond to this specific criticism in his rebuttal but sources within PR told The Malaysian Insider that some leaders disliked the idea of local council elections.
The resistance was not wholly due to wanting to have partisan control but because of shortcomings in how the councils themselves carried out their duties.
“There is an internal debate on whether to have elections or to correct the deficiencies in council structure first. It is pointless to have elections without fixing the council structure,” one source said.
The state bureaucracy came in for heavy criticism from panellists and the book’s writers.
“You can have five different economic models but if you can’t fix the bureaucracy, then it is all pointless,” said one panellist, political economist Prof Edmund Terrence Gomez.
Ambiga pointed to several of the book’s articles which described agencies which were either unaware or uninterested in carrying out the new policies they had been tasked with.
Khalid acknowledged this but did little to assure the audience that his administration had an answer to problematic civil service officers.
“Yes the bureaucracy is a setback. But this is the group of people that we have to deal with. We are trying very hard to change their mindsets and our approaches are difficult for them to comprehend. So we have to keep doing it slowly,” said the state’s top civil servant.
A PR official met at the launch explained that the bureaucracy dragged its feet mainly because they were uncertain that the coalition will remain in charge after the next general election.
The fear is that if BN returns, officers who had co-operated with PR would be sidelined and purged from the service, says the official, who has intimate knowledge of the state government’s problems with bureaucracy.
Most of the criticism, however, was reserved for the topic of race. Specifically, how PR was faltering in its avowed aim of transcending race in its policies and the image of its member parties.
“I don’t even want to talk about race when it comes to development. It’s a difficult issue but we must transcend it. We must forge economic models that go beyond it,” said Gomez, of Universiti Malaya.
He said the present economic slowdown was the perfect opportunity to take stock of the current failed model of market-driven, unregulated growth and replace it with an approach that was more inclusive, just and sustainable.
Again, Khalid conceded to how intractable race was in planning an economic policy saying: “It’s really tough to change the economy. We have to enhance income and reduce disparities. Only then can we talk about race.”
Not all of the panellist presentations were negative. Ibrahim Suffian of the opinion survey firm Merdeka Center, said that polls in Selangor showed respondents being generally positive about the direction the state was headed in under PR.
“They know the constraints that the administration faces. Public opinion is fickle but at the moment the sentiment is quite okay with regards to Selangor,” said Ibrahim.
In the end, claimed another official from the administration, substantive reform would only be possible if PR takes over the federal government.
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