I have the honour to announce that the DAP/Pakatan Harapan candidate for the Johor State Assembly seat of Senai will be former NGO activist and DAP Kelapa Sawit Branch Deputy Secretary, Alan Tee Boon Tsong.

An artist active in Johor NGO Yellow Flame, established during the first Bersih movement, Tee joined the DAP in 2016.

The incumbent Assemblywoman for Senai, Wong Shu Qi, will be standing for a parliamentary seat for the 14th General Elections.

From what has been announced so far, DAP hopes at least three new woman Members of Parliament from DAP would be elected in the new Parliament – Hannah Yeoh, who is presently the Selangor State Assembly Speaker; Yeo Bee Yin, who has left the safe seat of Damansara in Selangor State Assembly to contest in the Bakri parliamentary seat in Johor and Wong Shu Qui.

The parliamentary seats for Hannah Yeo and Shu Qi will be announced in due course, although I do not discount the possibility of the DAP announcing more woman parliamentary candidates.

At present, DAP has four woman MPs – Teo Nie Ching (Kulai), Kasthuri Patto (Batu Kawan), Teresa Kok (Seputeh) and Alice Lau (Lanang).

UMNO/Barisan Nasioinal leaders are confident that they would win the 14th General Election after Parliament has approved the Election Commission’s Constituency Redelineation Report last Wednesday, although it is the most undemocratic and ridiculous constituency gerrymandering in the nation’s history.

On paper, under the new constituency redelineation, which came into immediate effect in less than 24 hours after the parliamentary motion, UMNO/BN would gain additional advantage in some 10 parliamentary seats – which would secure Putrajaya for UMNO/BN.

But the biggest flaw of the gerrymandering and constituency redelineation is that it may be based on false premises – that it is possible to write off the non-Malay votes by concentrating them into fewer super-sized constituencies, while creating more Malay constituencies with smaller electorates in the region of 30,000 to 40,000 voters.

These calculations would be right and UMNO/BN would gain from the new constituency redelineation and gerrymandering if the voters in the 14th General Elections continued to vote as in previous general elections where it is possible to break down the constituencies largely into Malay or Chinese constituencies.

But these premises would be proved wrong if in the 14th General Election, voters cease to vote as Malays, Chinese or Indian voters but unite to support Pakatan Harapan and vote as Malaysian voters.

What will make the 14th General Election historic are two factors: firstly, it presents the country with the chance and even likelihood of the Pakatan Harapan coalition defeating UMNO/BN, which will see the first change of Federal government in the nation’s history marking a historic milestone of Malaysia becoming a normal democracy; secondly, voters in Malaysia voting as Malaysians rather than as Malays, Chinese, Indians, Kadazans and Ibans, defeating the premises for the worst gerrymandering by the Election Commission in its latest constituency redelineation proposals.

UMNO/Barisan Nasional leaders have always prided themselves as being more democratic than Singapore.

If so, I call on the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Seri Azalina Othman to withdraw the Anti-Fake News Bill, and follow the example of Singapore Parliament in establishing a Parliamentary Select Committee to study the need for Anti-Fake News legislation.

UMNO/BN leaders will not be able to claim that they are more democratic than Singapore when Singapore can have a Parliamentary Select Committee on Fake News but the Malaysian Government is not prepared to be equally committed to democratic principles of public consultation and feedback.

(Speech at the launching of the Kulai Pakatan Harapan General Election Operations Centre on Sunday, 1st April 2018 at 3 pm)