“It’s just like passing a law to decree that there must be love among husband and wife.”
No it isn’t, that’s nonsense. Rational, practical law serves mostly to constrain its subjects to a range of behaviour that is acceptable to the community they live in. The UK’s RRA is intended to limit the extent to which UK citizens may discriminate against persons on the grounds of race. The RRA is an attempt to outlaw socially divisive practices. Very few laws (outside of religion) compel anybody to do anything – that’s not what they’re for.

The RRA has worked, and continues to work in the UK. If you’re at all familiar with the UK, you will know that you’re never more than 5 minutes away from a Chinese (we use “a Chinese” to describe the takeaway business or the meal, never a person of Chinese descent). You will also know that it’s a rare Chinese takeaway or restaurant in the UK that employs people who are not (or don’t appear to me to be, I don’t take DNA samples) of Chinese descent. Nobody contests this. We have all seen Stan / Loretta in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian and know when we are struggling against reality.

Small scale racial discrimination is alive and well in the UK. What has mostly gone is systematic discrimination by employers, schools and the civil service. The availability of convenient, cheap and effective law, and largely unfettered press ready to pounce on careless racists means that it’s simply financially prudent for organisations to ensure they’re not favouring a particular race. Very few individuals ever feel the direct effect of the RRA, but without large organisations fanning the flames of discrimination, the language and practice of racial discrimination has become socially uncommon and even unacceptable. Unless you live in a particularly depressed area in the UK, or one with a high proportion of immigrants who have brought racist habits with them, or you find an old person that has rejected all cultural change since the Crusades, you are very unlikely to hear anyone use race to describe another person.

“There are already existing laws to punish those that raise sensitive racial/religious issues.” That’s not the same thing. Those laws prohibit discussion of racial discrimination, while permitting racial discrimination to continue unabated. I suspect those laws are there to protect the discriminatory provisions in other Malaysian laws.

Don’t be too quick to mock a Malaysian Race Relations Act. There are many people writing on this website that they’d like Malaysian Law to be amended or repealed. What justification would a government give for making those changes, other than by doing so they are bringing older laws into line with a better one? The problem is obvious – a Race Relations Act would be contrary to almost every other Malaysian Law. But the change has to start somewhere.

I too, can picture BN applauding and smiling at LKS and saying “Uncle Lim, you and your blogging friends were right all along, we’ve done everything you asked for, come here for a group hug and please, sit in the big chair” but it won’t ever happen. You might just have to accept the change you want being implemented by someone else. I realise that’s an optimistic view. If their RRA is more of the same old tripe, I’ll be using my worst Anglo Saxon monosyllables on it, same as any other sane but powerless bystander.

@ekans
“it is doubtful that this RRA could do any better.”
It is doubtful that any law could do better than the ISA. I’m sure the ISA can trump speeding tickets too. With the ISA in existence, nobody who invokes it can be said to have done wrong. Merely saying so would be subversive, wouldn’t it?

I’ve enjoyed reading the comments about a possible RRA, but it seems to me that the ISA is the supreme law of Malaysia. Discussions of law, under the circumstances, should be for entertainment value.

If, in some hypothetical otherworld, the ISA did not exist, would the appropriate charge for the case mentioned above not be “Wasting police time”, “Harrassment”, “Perverting the course of justice”, or any combination of these? I’d imagine the UK’s RRA wouldn’t have terribly much to say about a case like that one, and any one of those crimes would be more grave.

Is the RRA story really related to Ahmad Ismail’s recent contribution?

@cheng on
“Is it a breach on RRA? if a job vacancy required andidates to speak Mandarin? ”
It wouldn’t be in the UK. As others have observed, and as Azly’s article says “government asks for suggestions”, there is no such Act in Malaysia yet. That means our answers are all hypothetical. The UK’s RRA would have nothing at all to say about a job advertisement that says “must speak Mandarin”, unless Mandarin was not essential to the business. If you were being hired to work in a Chinese restaurant, or as an agent dealing with Chinese partners, you would have to be able to speak Mandarin, naturally. Language ability is not the same as race. If a fluent-Mandarin-speaking person of Jamaican descent applied and was rejected, you would have to come up with some convincing reason why another candidate was chosen, if the candidate raised a complaint. No-merit complaints are probably as common as ones with merit – I don’t know. UK law works on the basis of presumed innocence, so no-merit cases don’t have to be the end of anybody’s world, even if they are irritating.

If the job advertisement was for Bradford town centre KFC, I doubt an advertisement that specified ‘must speak Mandarin’ would go unchallenged. The way these kind of laws work in the UK might not be obvious from overseas. Gordon Brown does not send the SAS to Bradford town centre KFC when he hears they’re looking for Mandarin-speaking employees, and he does not publish a full-page advert in the Daily Mail saying “Racists take heed. You will be black bagged. Don’t cause trouble lah.”

What usually happens is somebody wants to work in Bradford town centre KFC, sees an ad that specifies Mandarin, goes to the store, sees all the Mandarin-speaking employees building a Fried Chicken Enclave behind the counter and … what? In the UK they might go to the police or to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. They’d probably send them to the Town Council first, who would pay a visit and point out the relevant legislation, although the police might do that too. The advert would be changed, and that would be that. The Race Relations Act has had such a huge effect in the UK that it would be unlikely even to see such an advert. The advertising staff at the newspaper would point out “you can’t do that”. If they put the ad in the store window, the window cleaner would point it out. It’s not really because punishment under the RRA is severe, it’s because after a generation or two growing up under the RRA, most people regard it as A Very Good Thing.

Because legal assistance is very easy to get in the UK, and because most people living there regard most of the law as A Very Good Thing, and because newspapers love to report on lawbreakers, particularly rich, powerful and famous ones, it is very much in a person’s favour NOT to break laws. If you’re in business, you simply comply with the law. If one of your competitors is not complying with the law, a simple suggestion of the fact to a policeman, journalist, activist or civil servant can put your competitor in the toilet. No-merit cases and nuisance cases carry are covered by other legislation, so it’s not a free-for-all with funny looking people you don’t share a human ancestor with shouting “is it because I is ginger?” and threatening to take you to court.

I hope that explains my support for a RRA in Malaysia. If it was like the UK’s RRA, it could have enormous effect on other laws that discriminate for no good reason. Malaysia’s Law needs a lot of competent attention. You have to start somewhere.

I was just thinking about the relevance of the RRA to the ISA and could think of none. When I refer to RRA, I mean something like the UK’s RRA, which says essentially: you must not discriminate (not against, nor for) on the basis of race. I’m not a lawyer, so help me out:

Say a Malaysian government – any government – tore the ISA pages out of the rule book and burnt them in the car park because there was ‘no reason to keep it’. Wouldn’t there be thousands of Malaysians calling their lawyers and claiming compensation? Uncle Lim! What is your hourly rate for detention without trial? If a government were to admit you were detained for ‘no reason’, wouldn’t that make a compensation claim possible? I’m not asking about the morality of such a claim, only its technical legitimacy.

Am I wrong about the possibility of compensation claims? Would a Malaysian government really just repeal the ISA like that? Or the NEP – if a government were to just make it disappear, it must have disadvantaged as many people as it benefited over the years. Isn’t there a risk that individuals and businesses may want to be compensated for their decades of losses?

If it is the case that a sudden change in the law might make the government liable to compensation claims, what government would do it? OK, abolition would be good, but is any electorate willing to make massive payments for injustices that may have happened long before they became politically aware?

Wouldn’t a government be more likely to implement some more recent law that made the older one untenable, and claim that there never was a good reason to change the old law until the new one came into force? It seems to me that way they could claim “the law was the law then, your loss was justified under that law, the new law means it won’t happen again. History is history” and make no further statement regarding the legitimacy of the old law. If they said “it was a mistake”, wouldn’t it be their mistake, because they would be the government (I mean even if, somewhere over the rainbow, the government is not BN)?

I can’t help thinking that if a Malaysian government were to do away with the NEP or ISA, they would need a non-fault method to do it. Something like enacting the RRA so they could say the NEP can’t be applied under the new Act, and perhaps ratifying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to say “in the light of recent changes, the ISA is no longer tenable.” without referring to its past legitimacy at all.

I’m not saying anybody will be looking for compensation. I’m only wondering if it’s a potential consequence of abolition, and if it is, is it possible to avoid being liable for what could be by now a considerable sum? Could it be that a RRA is one way to get what most people writing on here really, really want?

“A mat salleh in umno?”.
Actually I was recently toying with the idea of setting up the NMWMC – the Non-Malaysian White Man Congress – but when I asked my neighbours, they didn’t seem interested. Perhaps they felt excluded by the title? I asked my wife, who is Malaysian, not white and not a man. She said I would be on my own. I asked my kids, who are also Malaysian, not men and not as white as I am. I don’t think they understood, but then, one is less than 3 years old, the other only 6 months old.

I was very excited by the election. I’m impressed by a lot of the things LKS has written, so I was keen to attend the local DAP rallies. I was disappointed. This bit is difficult for me – I’ve grown up in a country where referring to someone’s race is considered more rude than asking how many sheets they use to wipe their arse – it’s simply a personal matter. The crowd at the two DAP rallies I attended appeared to me to be entirely of Chinese ancestry. The posters around the rally were in Chinese script, the handouts were in Chinese script. Right at the back of the crowd were a few people who didn’t appear to be of Chinese ancestry – I wonder if they even understood the speeches? All the speeches I heard (save one, in BM and Mandarin) were in Chinese.

On the available (to me) evidence, it would be easy to mistake DAP for a one-race party. I suspect as much as anything else, it’s simply a matter of old habits and some loose ends not properly tied up on DAP’s branding. If you go to the UK to see politicians campaigning (or the USA, I guess), you will see politicians putting tee-shirts and baseball caps on to visit ‘under privileged’ areas. They’ll be wearing Saville Row suits to go to privileged areas. There are many websites accusing David Cameron of addressing potential voters: “wassup my niggas, vote for my muthahumpin partay”. I doubt he has uttered the phrase, but the point is, they do tailor their message for their audience. While there are a lot of Malaysians who appear to have Chinese ancestry and commonly speak a Chinese dialect in the area where I live, perhaps the targeting could have been a little less precise – it’s not a monoculture around here.

There are some small things DAP could be doing to reduce the damage of accusations of racial bias. This website has an unfortunate front page: “Blog (English), Blog (Chinese), Malaysian First” could be improved. Why not “Blog, ??, Malaysian First”? I think the way it is now emphasises the omission of BM. Readers of roman script don’t need to know that there’s a Chinese script blog, and I’m sure I’ve seen frequent contributions in BM on this side of the blog.

How organised is the party? Wouldn’t it be possible for rally organisers in places where polyglots are more thinly spread to send their handouts and posters back to HQ for the addition of at least basic info in BM, Tamil and English? I refuse to believe there aren’t BM-, Tamil- and English- speaking DAP voters in a place like Port Dickson who wouldn’t mind taking the stage for a few minutes to provide a more complete message, and also to break the monotony – I was incredulous at the length of some of the addresses. Impressed by the stamina of the speakers, but also shocked – whatever else Malaysia may be, it’s not Cuba. Do voters really want to be harangued for 2 hours without a break? Sorry, that last bit is off-topic.

The racial bias accusation isn’t that hard to overcome. For an extra 5% effort on publicity, you could appeal to 3 times as many voters. I know from dealing with companies in Malaysia that there tends to be strict divisions between ‘turfs’, so maybe the same thing goes on in politics, but it’s simply an error, in my view. Not only do you risk alienating your non-target group, you also risk alienating voters who wish for less racial bias in politics.

What’s this got to do with suggestions for a Race Relations Act? Not much. Language is not race, it’s been said before. But it’s an easy mistake to make.