Pakatan Harapan is cheating the voters
Raja Sara Petra
Pakatan Harapan’s Election Manifesto is not a new document by any means. Pages 5 to 19 are actually recycled or lifted from earlier documents published in 1999 and 2008 — such as Agenda Reformasi, Deklarasi Rakyat, and so on, which my father was involved in drafting. You can, in fact, Google those documents and still find them on the Internet. That means Pakatan Harapan’s Election Manifesto is same-old-same-old with really nothing new to say. Does this mean Pakatan Harapan is bankrupt of ideas?
Many of the promises Pakatan Harapan makes in its Election Manifesto also cannot be implemented without a major amendment to the Federal Constitution of Malaysia. This essentially means Pakatan Harapan must not only win the general election, but they must win it with a two-thirds majority in Parliament, or not less than 149-150 seats. A two-thirds win in Parliament for Pakatan Harapan is impossible and is not going to happen. So that means Pakatan Harapan can ‘safely’ not deliver its election promises and not take the blame for it.
Pakatan Harapan is taking the voters for a ride. This is what we would call fraud. They make promises they cannot deliver, and they know when they cannot deliver these promises they can shift the blame to the Federal Constitution of Malaysia and not take responsibility for the failure. Removing the 6% GST and replacing it with the SST more than double that is stupid. You are merely giving back the rakyat RM1 and then taxing them RM2 in other ways. Have they done their arithmetic or not? How can abolishing RM45 billion in taxes and then taxing the rakyat RM100 billion in hidden ways be a better deal for Malaysians?
It is the same when Pakatan promised to abolish highway toll charges in 2008, which are mainly all in Selangor. After coming to power, they said highway toll charges is a federal matter and the Pakatan Selangor State Government has no power to remove them. That is a lie. The Pakatan Selangor State Government does have power to abolish highway toll charges. All they need to do is pay RM500 billion to the highway concessionaires so that highway users can drive on the highways free-of-charge. Why do they not do this?
The issue is money. With just RM2 billion in reserves, the Pakatan Selangor State Government cannot afford to abolish highway toll charges. And even if Pakatan Harapan gets to form the federal government, they still cannot afford to fork out RM500 billion to allow Malaysians to drive on the highways free-of-charge. So this has nothing to do with the argument that Pakatan is just the State Government and not the Federal Government.
