(Petaling Jaya, Sunday): The
Parliament home-page, www.parlimen.gov.my,
deserves the prize for the most user-unfriendly, inaccessible and uninformative
website among the world’s Parliaments and Malaysia’s public websites.
Tomorrow, Parliament is reconvening, but the
parliamentary order of business for tomorrow and the eight-day
meeting of Dewan Rakyat have
not yet been posted on to the homepage – as if the Parliament webmaster
reports for duty at the same time as MPs when they turn up for the start of the
new Parliamentary sitting at 10 a.m. tomorrow.
Six years after it was first launched, the
Parliamentary website continues to be a an IT disgrace to
the Parliament and the nation, making a mockery of Malaysia’s ambition
to be a premier IT power – totally devoid of meaningful and interactive
information on the site.
After six years, the Parliamentary website still
cannot post every Bill tabled for debate for the information of the Malaysian
public and the world – in fact, the Parliamentary home-page distinguishes
itself by not even having a single Bill or Act posted on its site.
In contrast, in the United Kingdom, all public
legislation after 1988 are available online
and the full text of Bills
currently before the UK Parliament can be accessed via the United Kingdom
Parliament website, http://www.parliament.uk/
The only available parliamentary material
available on the Malaysian Parliament website are the Hansards for this year and
last year but they are useless chunk of raw data, as there is no search engine
designed to help identify and pinpoint the
document one wishes to browse in a search.
Unless and Speaker, Tun Mohamad Zahir Ismail and
all MPs pay attention and take immediate steps
to revamp the Parliamentary website into one which is the pride of Malaysia and
the envy of other Parliaments, whether the
United Kingdom, Australia or the Congress of the
United States, then a motion should be formally moved in Parliament for
the removal of the Malaysian Parliamentary website to end the six-year IT disgrace to Parliament and Malaysia.
(16/6/2002)