PAKATAN Harapan is finalising its policy proposals, which will include reforming the education system and waging a more aggressive war against corruption, said Nurul Izzah Anwar.

The PKR vice-president said one of the proposals includes more safeguards on how the government spends public money.

These are among the immediate changes that PH guarantees should the coalition take over Putrajaya after the 14th general election.

Nurul Izzah told The Malaysian Insight that amendments to the laws to enable the reforms have been prepared.

The bills include changes to contentious laws, such as the Sedition Act, Printing Presses and Publications Act and the Petroleum Development Act.

The reforms are inspired by former Indonesian president BJ Habibie, who after taking over from military dictator Suharto in 1998, acted immediately to repair the republic’s broken institutions, such as the legislature, courts and police.

“We need separation of powers, a MACC (Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission), a judiciary, a police force that is free and independent.

“We need to ensure that the prime minister does not hold the finance portfolio,” she said.

Current Prime Minister Najib Razak is also the finance minister.

“These are structural reforms that pave the way for policies to be done in a professional and structured manner.

“This will create a strong and robust legal foundation and save the Malaysian education system,” Nurul Izzah, who is also PKR vice-president, told The Malaysian Insight.

In the run-up to the 13th general election, PH’s predecessor, Pakatan Rakyat, released a common policy platform called the Buku Jingga (Orange Book) to the public.

PH leaders claim that the Buku Jingga was one of the reasons it managed to capture 52% of the popular vote at GE13. They even accuse their rival Barisan Nasional of copying some of its ideas, such as the plan to bring down car prices.

Depoliticising education

Reforming the education system is something that has been close to Nurul Izzah’s heart as the Lembah Pantai MP has written extensively on the problems plaguing schools.

For her, the education system is even more important than the economy.

“A former World Bank economist Frederico Gil Sander, in charge of Malaysia, once said that the declining standard of our education is more worrying than our household debt problem.”

Her solution is to put the professionals and administrators back in charge of the system from designing and carrying out policies to running schools and universities.

“The education system must not be managed by politicians,” she said, though admitting that the head of the Education Ministry could still be a political appointee.

The problem is that Malaysians have taken the idea of political appointees to an extreme level. The result is that every minister who starts a five-year term introduces his or her own policies and plans while sidelining the predecessor’s.

She said in countries with successful education systems, such as Finland, political appointees will carry out strategies that have been in place for decades.

The most glaring example of the flip-flops that have damaged Malaysian schools is the policy to teach science and maths in English (PPSMI), she said.

The policy was started by former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad in 2003 and stopped in 2009 when Najib Razak took over as prime minister.

In the meantime, about RM3.2 billion had been spent equipping Malaysian schools and training teachers to implement it.

“Our PISA scores started going down after 2003, since PPSMI was introduced,” she said. PISA or Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) is ranking system that tests the academic performance of pupils in 59 countries.

“Our education system has left a whole generation of Malaysians behind their counterparts in Vietnam,” referring to how Vietnamese pupils scored higher than Malaysians in the 2012 PISA rankings.

Under a PH administration, the quality and cultural gap between vernacular and national schools will also be addressed through an emphasis on getting more of their pupils to interact with each other, she said.

“We have to remember that we are a deeply divided nation. Divide and rule was started by the colonial powers and continued by the ruling government.

“So, the focus should be nurturing unity and empathy. For those who have gone to SJKC (Chinese-medium schools) and SJT (Tamil-medium schools), we have to find ways to bring everyone to key meeting points across the board.

“The issue with parents who don’t want to send their kids to national schools is quality. Why is it that there are many more Malay parents sending their kids to Chinese schools versus Chinese parents who send their kids to national schools? It’s an issue of quality.” – June 28, 2017.