Democracy 101

Here's a Citizen's viewpoint on what our MPs should know about democracy. I'm interlacing it with recent happenings to draw a comparison with the Malaysian way of doing things.

1. Executive, Legislative and Judiciary should be separated. Full Stop. There's no two ways about it. Any investigation into the Judiciary should not be deliberated on by the Executive but by an Independent Committee. So the Cabinet should not be making a decision on whether a Royal Commission should be formed. When there is an obvious judicial crisis, it should be formed, that's it! Let's not even go to the last big one in 1988 which the government refuses to re investigate.
   
2. An Election Commission should be totally independent of the Executive. So the EC should not rely on the goodwill of the PM to allow independent observers for counting of postal votes. The EC Chairman himself made such a statement.
   
3. The government of the day has no business changing the Constitution at will. That's why we call it the Constitution. It was written by our founding fathers as a social contract and I'm sure they looked ahead into the future when agreeing on the clauses. Why would you want to change it? Even if you want to change it, there should be a referendum first.
4. An MP is a representative of the public. If he chooses to go against his political allies or his party's stand because he needs to stand up for the people he's representing, nobody has the right to discipline him. We are not asking for a flock of sheep in the parliament, we're looking for intelligence here.
5. People have the right to assemble peacefully. The police has no business shooting teargas and chemical laced water at them just to silence the brave. Obviously something is wrong with the system if things have to escalate to the level of tens of thousands of people gathering in the streets. Make no mistake there are hundreds of thousands more if not millions silently supporting the brave ones who chose to gather on the streets. I assure you if they were allowed to proceed peacefully, things would have turned out really different.
   
6. We Malaysians are adults. This is an era of globalism. Doing things behind closed doors is exactly what got us into this trouble in the first place. Isn't it about time we opened up the system and allowed transparency. There should be some things that are state secrets no doubt but how contracts are awarded and how the government choose to respond to events of public interest (among other things) is not.
7. ISA and EO(Emergency Ordinance) are outdated (read: undemocratic) and should be repealed. Please refer to point 6. Come on folks. Open up and do things transparently.
8. If a political party or any other organization is to remain relevant to it's stakeholders, it should look into the interest of the stakeholders. Otherwise the party or organization has no business making claims that it's the only organization for the stakeholders.

I'll end here, I have said enough and I believe items I have outlined in the list above are nothing new.