By Judy Tan
As I sit listening to the “Highlights of Parliament” these nights and glancing through “Straits Times” during lunch hour, this elderly auntie cannot help but feel a sense of despair and hopelessness made even worse with Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP) Chia Yong Yong’s speech.
I am very much appalled by her mannerism and tone in reaction to the Worker’s Party (WP)’s Chairman, that I decided to do a quick search on her and realized she is the sister of an active People’s Action Party (PAP) member which answers why she said the things she say. Pretty much “birds of a feather, flock together”, like how former presidential candidate Tan Kin Lian defended Tin Peiling’s track record (if any).
This incident alone demonstrates why the NMP scheme should be scraped by the next General Election and the opposition should be campaigning even louder on its abolition. We cannot have PAP appointed individuals who have not gone through “electoral baptism” to have a say in the running of our lives, what more 9 says!
I do not think we need to fork out extra monies in the coffers to pay most NMPs to echo and endorse PAP ministers, while 1 or 2 puts up a show of pretense opposition thus shortchanging us in the process.
Back to NMP Chia’s speech which is fundamentally flawed and I will tell you why:
Firstly, she conveniently ignores where most of our taxes went to with all MPs remaining largely unaware of how much the State really has and how much its entities have made or lost through the years.
Secondly, she mentioned that Central Provident Funds are not our monies, really? Then whose monies it really is? When I asked MP Tin Peiling to probe Sections 60 and 65 on the CPF’s failure in recovering several lapsed payments from employers, the Board responded that CPF monies are not the government’s but the individuals. I then asked a follow-up question to Tin on why we cannot fully withdraw our monies at 55 (since it belongs to us), she could not muster an answer.
Thirdly, for whom (or whose benefit) is the nation making so much money for and in NMP Chia’s opinion, where should all these monies be channeled to and how should it be spent? On more foreign scholarships and even more failed investments such as the Suzhou Park and Holland-Bukit Timah Town Council’s Lehman Brothers incident etc.?
Lastly, if she had read statistics, she would not have failed to notice that ours is already the lowest in social spending, medical investiture among first world countries. Even third world Malaysia has got $1 medical clinics and a 6.75 return rate on their Employees Provident Fund (EDF)!
It saddens me to know the government’s rationale of putting NMP Chia in parliament, supposedly to ‘champion’ the needs of the disabled which is an insult to them actually, witnessing her apathetic performance. On the other hand, the WP Chairman’s assertions that “left is right” is right actually, seeing that the PAP from far right, moving slowly but surely to the left with the WP presence cannot be anything but right!
