DAP welcomes the establishment of a National Housing Company with a start-up capital of RM1 billion to assist developers build more low and medium-cost houses and provide more opportunities for people to own houses.
In the early 1970s, the DAP had been the first to propose the formation of a Housing Ministry to be responsible for ensuring that Malaysians enjoy affordable housing.
Unfortunately, many Housing Ministers have come and gone, but the goal of affordable housing for Malaysians have receded further and further into the background until recently, the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamaed made the startling announcement abandoning the four-decade-old Alliance and Barisan Nasional government policy since Merdeka of promoting a house-owning democracy!
DAP calls on the government to ensure that the National Housing Company should not be allowed to fail and must spearhead the building of adequate low-cost to meet the housing needs of the low-income groups while the government should remain committed to the goal of a house-owning democracy.
The Finance Minister should heed public appeals for increases to his proposal to provide tax reliefs of a maximum of RM5,000 for all medical expenses for acute or terminal diseases like cancer, HIV/AIDs, renal failures, leukaemia and others.
With the spiralling costs of health-care, RM5,000 tax relief on medical expenses for acute or terminal diseases is most inadequate, as in many such cases, the patients have go give up their jobs altogether. Tax relief for acute diseases should not be nominal and should be increased to at least RM20,000 for a start.
The Government stands to make RM100 million from the RM50 service charge for each credit card proposed under the budget, as there are about two million credit cards in the country.
This measure must be seen as a genuine step to check excessive spending and not as a easy way for the government to collect RM100 million from the public. For this reason, the RM50 service charge for credits cards should be exempted for single-card holders or for any one credit card for multiple card-holders.
Last week, the Deputy Education Minister, Datuk Dr. Fong Chan Onn said that the Education Ministry would investigate into the incident of a teacher in Taman Selayang in Selangor who was so insensitive to the feelings of the Indian community as to use the derogatory term ‘pariah’ in a Form Four history examination question and to take appropriate action if the incident is confirmed.
The question was wrongly structured and not found in the history curriculum. The question had asked which strata of the Indian caste system pariah and harijan belonged to, when both are not among the four stratas of the caste system.
The Ministry of Education should publicly be seen as firm in taking action against teachers have set a bad example to the students in being utterly insensitive to the feelings of different communities in a multi-racial society, not only as an object-lesson to all other teachers but to the students as well.
The continued procrastination on the part of the Education Ministry from taking appropriate disciplinary action against the teacher concerned would only create the impression that the Education Ministry is condoning such an action and is trying to hush up the incident.
I am shocked at the slipshodness of the Education Ministry in the translation of the UPSR mathematics paper 1 into Tamil held last month, where there have been errors in 20 out of the 40 questions.
In some questions, the translation was completely wrong. For instance, in the Bahasa Malaysia version, Question 13 of the Mathematics paper asked about an isosceles triangle (where two sides are of equal length) while the Tamil version asked for an equilateral triangle (where the three sides are equal). The other questions contianed many errors or bad translations, which make it very difficult for the students to answer properly.
The fear among the parents is that there would be a high failure rate in the UPSR mathematics paper 1 in the Tamil stream as a result of the bad and wrong translation, adversely affecting the promotional prospects of the students.
The officials responsible for the poor and wrong translation of the UPSR mathematics paper from Bahasa Malaysia into Tamil should be sacked, for he has caused confusion and agony to all the students for the Tamil UPSR throughout the nation.
How can the Education Ministry talk about wanting to make Malaysia a regional centre for excellence in education when such shocking mistakes could be made in a centralised government examination paper?
Students throughout the country who sat for the paper should not be penalised because of the bad and wrong translations in the Mathematics paper 1, and I call on the Education Ministry to direct the examiners marking the paper to disregard the 20 questions in the paper which contained bad and wrong translations.
The Minister of Education should inform Parliament what action the Ministry has taken against the officials responsible for such unforgivable mistakes.
(28/10/96)