Alice Lau, Oscar Ling in no mood for celebration

SIBU: New Lanang MP Alice Lau and Sibu MP Oscar Ling Chai Yew said their victories in the 13th general election were no cause for celebration.

“No doubt we are happy with our victories but on hindsight and like our party (DAP) supporters, we are all disappointed because we were unable to beat money politics to achieve our dream which is to change the government,” they said in their first press conference after the election.

Lau regretted that DAP would remain as opposition and they would not be able to get funds for development from the government.

Saying the opposition believed that frauds were committed in several constituencies during the election, she revealed that the party would challenge the legitimacy of the BN government within the next 21 days.

Lau beat BN-SUPP candidate Datuk Tiong Thai King with a majority of 8,630 votes while Ling defeated Vincent Lau Lee Ming, also from BN-SUPP, with 2,841 votes.

Lau said it was irrelevant for Second Finance Minister Dato Sri Wong Soon Koh to blame the DAP’s strategy of playing the `anger and hatred’ card that purportedly brought about the downfall of the SUPP candidates.

Instead, she said, SUPP should do soul-searching and return to the basics to find out why they failed so miserably in all the Chinese-predominant seats.

“Our nightly ceremahs may have influenced some of the voters but the majority of our supporters had already decided to support us even without our ceramahs. As such, it was unfair to blame us for creating racial politics,” she said.

Lau said it was also not right for Wong to shift responsibilities now that SUPP had lost all the Chinese-predominant seats.

Wong was reported to have said that the people should now turn to the DAP for assistance since they no longer wanted SUPP representatives in the government.

“Perhaps, he has forgotten that he is still the Bawang Assan assemblyman and it is his duty to bring development to the rakyat,” Lau said. She promised to serve the people irrespective of their race and religious background.

“As an MP, it is our duty to serve the people with full dignity and responsibilities,” she added.

On the just-concluded election, Lau said she had noticed discrepancies at the polling stations which gave cause for suspicion.

Among them, she mentioned, were the so-called indelible ink which many voters had easily deleted, phantom voters and the use of pencils instead of pens for voters to mark their ballots.

“Fortunately for us, we had enough volunteers at the respective polling stations to ‘catch’ the phantom voters,” she pointed out.

She, however, could not tell whether there were phantom voters who managed to slip from the volunteers’ eyes but believed the presence of the volunteers was effective to deter phantom voting.

“Apparently, the opposition in the peninsula was not as lucky as we were,” she lamented.

Lau also questioned the instances of power disruption during the counting of votes at some counting centres, urging the authority to conduct a thorough investigation. In the election, BN garnered 46.8 per cent of the total votes and took 133 seats while Pakatan Raykat won over 50 per cent but got only 89 seats.

This, Lau pointed out, said much about the delineation of constituencies. Speaking at the same press conference, Ling called on the police to probe the fire at a Malay food stall in Jalan Bandong on Monday morning.

“It could be arson,” he suggested, saying the stall operator is a PKR member.

Ling also claimed of cases where people clad in ‘Ubah’ T-shirts were attacked when returning home after attending DAP ceramahs.

On the election, he said most of those who supported him were Chinese. “The support of the Malays and Ibans for the opposition in Sibu constituency had dropped,” he lamented.

Ling said he would work extra hard to serve the two communities to gain their support.