Kit Siang walks out of Dewan in 'disgust'

KUALA LUMPUR: Opposition stalwart Lim Kit Siang said left the Dewan Rakyat in “disgust” this morning when Deputy Speaker Ronald Kiandee refused to entertain his attempt to pose a supplementary question on the New Economic Model.
The original question regarding the effectives of the NEM in achieving its objectives was raised by Ismail Abdul Muttalib (BN-Maran) and Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister's Department K Devamany responded.

In a statement issued later, Lim said he wanted to raise several points, including the absence of Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak and the many ministers in his department to answer the question.

“This shows that the Barisan Nasional government is neither really seriously nor fully committed whether to Najib’s 1Malaysia concept, NEM or Parliament,” he added.

Apart from this, the DAP leader also wanted to know “why for more than six months not a single minister dared to state that the NEM was not against Article 153 of the Federal Constitution to check the rise of racism because of the rhetoric of communal extremists, although the prime minister has gone to the United Nations general assembly and Asia-Europe dialogue to call for a global movement of moderates against extremists.”

Lim also wanted to know if Najib's administration had taken full ownership of the proposals in the NEM for Malaysia to escape the two-decade long middle-income trap to achieve sustainable and inclusive high-income developed nation status by 2020 and not regard the NEM proposals as mere “trial balloons” of a group of experts from the global market perspective as said by Najib in June.
The veteran policition also wanted to quiz the government's stand in particular on the NEM Strategic Reform Initiative (SRI) 5 for “transparent and market-friendly affirmative action” which would “consider all ethnic groups fairly and equally as long as they are in the low income 40% of households…..taking into consideration the needs and merits of the applicants.”