Parliament and the various State Assemblies must play a special role in the country’s transition to the Information Society in at least the following four areas:
Firstly, all MPs and State Assemblymen, whether in government or in opposition, should seek to raise awareness of IT among the Malaysian public at large, particularly among those who are currently non or unconfident users of information and communcations technologies by removing the social, educational and cultural barriers to people who would like to know more about computers, Internet and IT.
To do this, Parliament and all State Assemblies should form IT Standing Committees to promote IT literacy among all sectors of the people and popularise the concept of the information society where Malaysia can fully benefit from the information and communication technologies.
For a start, there should be a programme to make all Ministers, Deputy Ministers, Parliamentary Secretaries, Chief Ministers, Mentri-Mentri Besar, State Executive Councillors, MPs and State Assemblymen and women computer-literate within a year - at least by before the official take-off of the MSC next September with the completion of the Prime Minister’s Office in Putrajaya, so that they could be role models to help the people, particularly those above 40 years, to overcome their fear of computers.
Secondly, Parliament and all State Assemblies should have interactive homepages whereby members of the public can have access to Parliamentary and State Assembly proceedings as well as their elected representatives. All MPs and State Assemblymen should have email address for online contact.
Thirdly, Parliament and State Assemblies should perform the important educational role to raise national awareness and guide public discussion about the IT developments and trends, their positive potentials and inherent risks, and how they would impact on the quality of everyday life.
Parliament, for instance, should form specialist committees to study how IT would affect education, work, leisure, laws, ethics, morals, the economy, defence and even the future of the nation-state, learn from IT developments in the rest of the world and generate ideas and initiate an ongoing discussions on the contours of the society we are building in our quantum leap into the Information Age.
The Information Era is an age of empowerment through information and knowledge, and Parliament must similarly be empowered in the age of IT to be involved in all stages of formulation of policy and legislation, and not just be a rubber-stamp of the Executive where the sole role of the MPs is to shout “yes” to all legislation tabled before the House by the Cabinet.