NEW Dewan Rakyat deputy speaker Nga Kor Ming will push for reforms in Parliament, uphold the Standing Orders and rid the august House of its image as a rubber stamp for the government.

Nga met with Dewan Rakyat speaker Mohd Ariff Md Yusof after the sitting yesterday to discuss ways to restore the independence of Parliament.

He said de facto law minister Liew Vui Keong was also at the meeting and he had asked the latter to bring back the Parliamentary Services Act which was repealed in 1992.

“We will be bringing out the reforms step by step, so Malaysians can be proud of their Parliament,” the Teluk Intan MP told The Malaysian Insight in an interview last night.

Nga, however, said the reforms will have to be done in stages. Using women’s suffrage as an example, he said it took 75 years for women to win their right to vote.

“Any reform is a huge undertaking. I have only started work for less than 48 hours, I don’t even have a training period. But the first thing we did was to free up the media and let them report news from the Parliament freely,” he said.

He was referring to the reopening of Parliament’s lobby to reporters, who had previously been sequestered to a media room further away, denying journalists access to lawmakers in the Dewan Rakyat. – July 17, 2018.