COMMENT | On the vicious, immmoral attacks against speaker Azhar Azizan Harun

COMMENT | We are appalled by the behaviour of Pakatan Harapan Members of Parliament (MPs) last week following the constitutional appointment of Azhar Azizan Harun as the Dewan Rakyat speaker.

We are also puzzled by the claims and baseless allegations being repeated by a section of Harapan MPs, in their rush to question Azhar's (photo, above) credentials.

The personal attacks and childish rants coming from the opposition bench last week played out in the full view of Malaysians who have been taught to respect our parliamentary system, and are symptoms of a larger malaise of political dementia affecting these MPs.

The public saw for themselves a total absence of decorum when opposition MPs indulged in name-calling and shouting to disrupt Azhar during his oath-taking.

Among others, it was claimed that Azhar's appointment was not put to a vote.

Clearly, the MPs are either ignorant or deliberately chose to sideline Dewan Rakyat's standing order 4(3), which clearly states as follows:

"If only one member or person be so proposed and seconded as Yang di- Pertua, he shall be declared by the Setiausaha without question put, to have been elected."

It was this very rule which the Harapan MPs adhered to in naming Mohamad Ariff Md Yusof as the speaker in June 2018, as he was the only candidate for the post.

Yet, the then-opposition MPs had chosen to respect Ariff's oath-taking despite their initial protests, unlike the vile, repulsive, and odious behaviour showed by some of the Harapan MPs when Azhar took oath last week.

May we also remind those who are too eager to discredit Azhar and question his well-known non-partisanship, that this was the same individual Harapan had trusted to lead one of the nation's most important institutions of democracy, the Election Commission.

We call upon Harapan leaders to play their roles as opposition members responsibly. After all, when they were in the government, many Harapan MPs had openly claimed they had no qualms reverting to the opposition bench, having been used to such a role for decades.

The above is signed by Bandar Tun Razak MP Kamarudin Jaffar, Segamat MP Edmund Santhara, Saratok MP Ali Biju, and Ranau MP Jonathan Yasin.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.