Sandakan by-election win endorsement on performance of PH, Warisan – Chong
KUCHING: Pakatan Harapan (PH) Sarawak and Democratic Action Party (DAP) Sarawak chairman Chong Chieng Jen opines that the Sandakan by-election result is an endorsement of the people of Sandakan on the performance of Pakatan Harapan (PH) federal government and Warisan state government in the past one year.
The Deputy Minister of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs pointed out that neither PH nor Warisan engaged racist elements which represented "the hallmark of Umno and PAS" in Peninsular Malaysia politics.
"Despite a much lower voter turnout of only 54 per cent compared to the 2018 general election turnout of 73 per cent in Sandakan, DAP's Vivian Wong won with a bigger majority of 11,521 votes compared to the late Stephen Wong's 10,098 majority in 2018.
"In short, the Sandakan people in particular and Sabahans in general are happy with the good co-operation between the Warisan/ PH state government and the PH federal government," he said yesterday when commenting on the Sandakan by-election results.
Chong, who is Stampin MP and Kota Sentosa assemblyman, asserted that Sabah's politics "is similar to Sarawak's in that both do not have the 3R - race, religion and royalty - elements which have been fully manipulated by Umno and PAS".
According to him, Sabahans have benefited from the good relationship between the federal and state government in Sabah for the past one year.
On the contrary, he said the Gabungan Parti Sarawak (GPS) government constantly played politics in all federal-state matters, leaving a lot of good initiatives of the federal government hampered or even sabotaged.
As a result, Sarawakians were denied many of the benefits of the federal government's initiatives, he lamented.
"One example is the proposed Article 1(2) of the Constitution amendment restoring Sabah and Sarawak to our original 1963 positions under Malaysia Agreement 1963.
"This was rejected by the Sarawak GPS government. Another example is the RM1-billion extra allocation from the repayment of loan for the repairs of the dilapidated schools in Sarawak, for which the Sarawak GPS government insists that the federal government should bypass the constitutional financial procedures.