Parliamentary Institutional Reforms in Malaysia: The Case of the Pakatan Harapan Era, 2018–2020

Abstract

The parliamentary institution is the nation’s highest legislative body in a democratic system, where it enacts, amends, and approves federal laws, examines government policies and approves government spending. However, in Malaysia, during the Barisan Nasional (BN) era, this institution was frequently criticised due to its numerous flaws. Among them were executive control over parliamentary institutions, disregard for the opposition’s role and unequal development provision between government and opposition parliamentarians. Therefore, during the 14th General Election (GE14) campaign, Pakatan Harapan (PH) promised to implement parliamentary reforms, and that pledge carried PH to victory in the GE14. This article utilised the concept of institutional reform as a tool of analytics to discuss parliamentary institutional reforms during the PH’s governmental term from 2018 to 2020. The primary sources of this study were interviews and secondary sources, which were obtained through books, journals and newspapers. This article argues that the PH government has successfully implemented several parliamentary institutional reforms in only 22 months. The reforms were the reform of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the establishment of more parliamentary select committees, the restructuring of constituency development funds for members of parliament (MPs) and the appointment of non-partisan speakers. All these reforms have benefited Malaysia’s parliamentary institutions by increasing the role of the opposition, allocating fair constituency development funds to parliamentarians and improving the parliamentary image. Nevertheless, comprehensive reforms were not implemented because the PH government was ousted from power at the end of February 2020 because of the actions of several PH MPs who defected from the party.