The new emergency ordinance, which allows Putrajaya to spend the treasury’s consolidated funds without parliamentary oversight and scrutiny smacks of plans to get the current state of emergency nationwide extended beyond its August 1 expiry date, Lim Guan Eng said.
The DAP Secretary General said the Perikatan Nasional (PN) government knows it has to reopen parliament, currently suspended under the emergency, in order to seek approval for supplementary budgets.
“Knowing (this), the prime minister has chosen to bypass parliament completely,” Lim said in a statement.
He called the ordinance, gazetted yesterday, an act of treachery against parliament and the federal constitution, as well as being a “cruel April Fools’ joke” on parliamentary democracy.
“It grants the prime minister unfettered powers on the nation’s financial coffers.
“The nation’s tens of billions of ringgit can now be determined by one man instead of going through the check and balance system of parliamentary democracy.
FMT
“This is an extremely dangerous power accorded to the prime minister through financially guillotining parliament,” the former finance minister said.
He said that if additional funds were indeed needed to combat Covid-19, there would be no need to bypass Parliament as the opposition would likely support any such spending boost.
“Without parliamentary oversight, there is an elevated risk that any new spending made by this government would not be properly accounted for, and cronies will benefit instead of the people.”
