Steven Sim - Penang Monthly (Page 2)

A history of local elections in Penang Part II: A legacy to protect

12 min read

In response to the increased dynamism evident in Malaysian politics today, and in order to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of local elections in Penang and...

Local elections as the foundation of democracy Part I: The Athi Nahappan Report revisited

8 min read

Penang in the 1960s. The newly formed Alliance central government had found it increasingly difficult to govern and achieve its version of national unity beca...

Koay Su-Lyn

The Athi Nahappan Report revisited Part 2: Local elections are part of a larger reform agenda

13 min read

The most cited recommendation of the Athi Nahappan Royal Commission of Enquiry must be the restoration of local government elections. Today, half a century late...

Koay Su-Lyn

Corruption and cronyism: Two sides of the same coin

5 min read

Following the first Bumiputera Economic Congress in 1965, Majlis Amanah Rakyat (Mara) was established as a statutory body through an Act of Parliament. The trus...

Giving the people a say – it’s their money after all

5 min read

Sometime in December last year, at a forum on the state and national budget organised by Lee Khai Loon, the state assemblyman for Machang Bubok, I threw out a c...

Insidious Selfies: Should Leaders Act like the Rest of Us?

7 min read

Last year in May, President Barack Obama came to Malaysia for the first time. When he was here, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak couldn’t resist...

Lessons from Journey to the West

7 min read

Before the story was depicted in films and movies, Xuan Zhang’s mythical journey and the monkey’s adventure were re-enacted on many an opera stage...

Selfie Politics: Perhaps We Need Superheroes After All

5 min read

I wrote recently about “selfie politics” – how politicians try to project an “I’m-like-youthe- normal-people” image, exempli...

The Problem is not Intolerance, it is Injustice

7 min read

A buddy of mine treated me to a stand-up comedy show in May. It was my birthday. The show featured four highly-acclaimed comedians and all of them were funny....

The Political Economy of Malaysia’s Migrant Worker Business

7 min read

Presently, we have a substantial number of migrant workers in the country – 2.1 million registered ones and another two to three million unregistered ones...

The Budget Speech Is NOT the Budget (Part One)

7 min read

Parliament must appear very strange for the uninitiated. After all, the Westminster system that Malaysia models itself after is an old and quaint one. There a...

The Budget Speech is NOT the Budget (Part Two)

4 min read

Many parties, including my parliamentary colleagues and myself, have pointed out the shortcomings of our budgetary process in the past, such as Budget doc...