Mahathir: “When you believe you can become popular by giving the people money, then you will find that the people will demand even more money.”
“The pay of a prime minister is not enough to buy support… So what do you do? You [allegedly] steal!”
Pointed words indeed.
So it is BN 72, DAP 7, PKR 3. So that is 10 seats for the opposition, which falls at the bottom end of analyst Faisal S Hazis’s forecast of 10-16 seats.
The result falls a bit flat. Both sides have little to be proud of. The BN because of their appalling and unethical electoral tactics, including the barring of opposition campaigners into the state; the opposition parties because of their hubris, their inability to cooperate and agree on straight fights, their lack of long-term ground work in many seats, and the little apparent difference in economic ideological thinking (ie corporate neoliberal ideology) between the BN and Pakatan parties.
The key figure to watch out for is 44 per cent. That’s the percentage of the popular vote which the opposition parties and independent candidate won in the 2011 state election (2011 state election – 29 per cent) when they bagged 16 out of 71 seats.
This time, there are 82 seats. Can they hit 44 per cent this time around with all the money being splashed around and opposition candidates being denied entry into Sarawak? Share with us your own updates in the comments below:
Sadiq Khan, 45, a former newspaper delivery boy whose father worked as a bus driver after moving to Britain from Pakistan and mother as a seamstress, grew up in a council estate and went on to become a human rights lawyer. Deal with that, Donald Trump.
Now ain’t that something! This will go nicely with our fifth place ranking in the list of countries with the most illicit financial flows (Malaysia chalked up total flows of US$419bn in the period 2004-2013!) and our fame from 1MDB, thank you very much.
PKR deputy president Azmin Ali is the latest opposition campaigner to be blocked in what is turning out to be the most farcical election campaign the state has ever seen.
Thousands of delegates, most of them apparently from India, have converged in Penang for a large but low-profile direct selling convention at the Spice conference centre in Penang.
Check out Taiwan’s first street-level light rail or modern tram sytem.
This is a quick look at some of civil society’s main concerns about the masterplan put forward by the project delivery partner SRS Consortium. Please share.
Of late, there has been talk that the Penang Botanic Garden should follow in the footsteps of its Singapore counterpart and apply for Unesco world heritage status.
I think the problem is that the more expensive the masterplan that the consortium comes up with, the more PDP (project delivery fees) it will be able to charge at 6 per cent of project costs and the more land reclamation that will be required by the state for sale to developers.
Anyway, this statement has just been released by Penang-based NGOs. Check out their concerns below: