Malaysia trails Indonesia in women politicians

Yet again, Malaysia is compared with Indonesia in democratic practices and is found wanting. This time in the area of women representation in politics.

DAP Penang lawmaker Chong Eng (pic) today renewed calls to the Barisan Nasional government to amend the Elections Act for a 30% quota for women candidates in all political parties contesting in elections at parliamentary and state levels.

"Malaysia is far behind at both the executive and legislative levels. Out of our 35 ministers, only two are women. In the 2013 general election, only 10.7% or 56 out of 523 parliamentary candidates were women.

"Now, women MPs only represent 23 seats out of 222 parliamentary seats in Parliament, and this percentage has failed to improve since 1999," she said at a press conference today.

The Penang women, family and community development executive councillor said Indonesia had shown that it was maturing democratically with a rise in the number of women politicians, whereas Malaysia was "stagnant".

In elections this year, Indonesia had 2,467 women candidates out of a total of 6,619, which was an increase to 37% from 30% in the 2009 polls.

Eight women ministers were then appointed to President Joko Widodo's 34-member cabinet, and for the first time, Indonesia appointed a woman foreign minister.

"Why has women's representation in Indonesian politics overtaken us so drastically? In Malaysia, it has remained stagnant," Chong said.

She also cited how badly Malaysia fared in the recently released World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2014, which took into consideration the number of women in parliament and holding ministerial posts.

"It confirmed our worsening international record. Malaysia's ranking is an embarrassing. We are at number 132 out of 142 nations.

"We are the second worst in Southeast Asia, just ahead of Brunei, which is at number 142 for a nation that has no elections. Indonesia is far ahead of us, at number 86," she said.

Chong blamed this on the lack of reforms in Malaysia and said Indonesia had made electoral reforms since becoming more democratic in 1999.

A 30% quota for women and proportional representation in its electoral system were among the reforms.

The 30% quota system was introduced through Article 65(1) of the Electoral Law 12/2003, stating that all political parties should observe the quota when fielding candidates for national, provincial and district-level elections.

It was not compulsory until the law was amended by Article 55 of the Electoral Law 10/2008, which compelled political parties to name one woman in every three candidates in elections.

"In recent times, parties that failed to observe the quota were barred from contesting. This year, the republic's General Election Commission disqualified 77 candidates from five parties because they failed to follow the ruling," Chong said.

The proportional representation electoral system, she said, also gave women and minority candidates, as well as smaller parties, fairer chances at winning seats.

Research by the Inter-Parliamentary Union found that such a system delivered a higher percentage of women MPs (25%) in 2012, compared to the first-past-the-post practice in Malaysia (14%), or a mixture of the two systems (17.5%).

"If we are to catch up with Indonesia and other maturing democracies, we should commit to increasing women's political representation through concrete actions.

"Our Election Commission must also seriously consider reforming our existing system to a proportional representation system," she said.

Chong also said it was important for Parliament to have more MPs who understood women and children issues to give better representation to the groups.

Some MPs were ignorant in matters concerning women and children to the extent that they would defend controversial issues such as child marriages.

Chong was commenting on Tasek Gelugor MP Datuk Shabudin Yahya who defended child marriages in Parliament yesterday.

He had said that minors would be "victimised" and find themselves in “unforeseen circumstances” if marriage were to be restricted to those aged 18 and above.

He reportedly said that although the Shariah Court could give consent for children aged nine and above to be married, it was not as easy as it seemed, and that there were existing laws to prevent abuse.

Yesterday, DAP's Kulai MP Teo Nie Ching had called on the BN government to ban all underaged marriages in the country, regardless of a child's religion.

Malaysia had adopted a United Nations resolution to end child marriages at the Human Rights Council in October last year. – October 31, 2014.