17 November 2016:
It’s been a long 12 hour day in Parliament today. We debated on the Prime Minister’s department budget today and with a staggering 8 Ministers in the PM Department, the session just dragged on to late night. I debated at 12 noon and waited 9 hours for the relevant minister to reply to my question at 9.15 pm.
Some of the ministers in the PM Department have such obscure portfolios that no one really knows what they do. For instance Gerakan President Mah Siew Keong is in charge of Hindu Endowment board among other things and spoke for less than 15 minutes. Then we got Shahidan Kassim who was once super powerful, now demoted to being in charge of disaster relief, being jokingly called “Menteri Bencana”.
Tomorrow we go into the budget of the Ministry of Finance, but rest assured that PM Najib who did not appear today to defend his PM Department, will not appear again tomorrow to defend his Finance Ministry. Instead the Finance Minister 2 and two Deputy Ministers will most likely be there. Like Pahang Datukships, Ministers and Deputy Ministers are dime a dozen in Malaysia.
18 November 2016:
I got a reply from the Minister of Defence on my question about naval spending and whether it is in response to China’s island-building exercises in the South China Sea.
The reply I got was so staggeringly stupid.
The Minister said that the navy gets RM2.6 billion for operations. No details. Same as Najib’s donation, hahaha. Then it says that this operational budget is used for operations! That is such an obviously stupid reply. That the operational budget has nothing to do with China.
Malaysian Parliament under UMNO BN is totally unaccountable.
