During a mammoth final day of parliament in which eight new laws were passed, the Dewan Rakyat gave the green light to amendments to the Printing Presses and Publications Act that take away the Home Minister’s ‘absolute discretion’ in granting or refusing a printing press licence.
The changes also remove his power to specify the validity period of that licence, take away the minister’s absolute discretion on whether newspapers from Singapore can be sold here, and add an appeal process before a licence is revoked or suspended.
Amazingly, DAP’s Lim Kit Siang has dismissed these huge changes saying “what we are seeing are baby steps”.
“Clearly there is no political will to bring political transformation,” he added, utterly contradicting the momentous reforms the government has recently undertaken including the scrapping of the ISA.
“Giant leaps” would be more appropriate.
In all, eight bills have been debated and passed in the past two days including measures to boost our environmental laws and an amendment to better regulate the medical profession.
The success of Pakatan MPs in having their voices heard during the long, final day of the Parliamentary session debate on the PPPA makes a mockery of their accusations just 24 hours earlier that the government was trying to “bulldoze” through important legislation without giving MPs enough time for proper debate.
PKR vice-president Nurul Izzah Anwar had claimed “that our Parliament is nothing more than a mere rubber stamp.”
Kit Siang too had plenty of time to speak despite the so called “bulldozing” of the bill. His complaint was that the PPPA should have been scrapped altogether. Kit Siang’s all-or-nothing stance has proven once again that Pakatan has no answer when faced with genuine reform.
In order to get all the legislation passed, the Dewan Rakyat had to “suspend time”. It sounds like science fiction but it is in fact a rarely used parliamentary procedure to stop the clock thus allowing the house to stay sitting until everything is done.
The session finally ended at 3.21am, the parliamentary session has now ended and the next stop for these MPs is almost certainly GE13.