By Parliamentary Opposition Leader, DAP Secretary-General and MP for Tanjung, Lim Kit Siang, in Petaling Jaya on Saturday, August 1987:
DAP calls on Immigration Department not to be lax in issuing work permits, and must ensure that every applicant has complied with all the local requirements like registration with the Board of Engineers for expatriate engineers
The Immigration Department has been lax and slipshod in issuing work permits to Antah Biwater expatriate engineers, when they had not complied with all local legal requirements, like registration with the Board of Engineers.
Antah Biwater has now admitted that none of its expatriate engineers had registered with the Board of Engineers as required by the Registration of Engineer Act 1967, and had therefore broken the law and each unregistered engineer is liable to $2,000 fine for the offence of practicing as an engineer without being registered with the Board.
It is indeed shocking that the Home Ministry, which could be so unreasonably strict in citizenship, passport, and other matters, couldbe so lax the expatriate has complied with all local requirements.
The Immigration Department should not issue work permits to expatriates unless all local legal requirements have been complied with, e.g. show proof that he had registered with the Board of Engineers as required by the 1967 Registration of Engineers Act.
The law must be applied equally and fairly to all persons, whether Malaysians or foreigners. For this reason, the Antah Biwater expatriated engineers who had breached the Registration of Engineers Act 1967 should be charged and fined as provided in the Act, for there could no be one law for Malaysians and another law for foreigners. Otherwise, Malaysia would have achieved our independence only in name but not in essence, and we have not got rid of our colonial mentality!
Failure of the Johore Seafood Carnival Week should be a lesson to Johore Mentri Besar and all government leaders not to play petty chauvinistic politics in economic development and tourist promotion.
The Johore Seafood Carnival Week, August 1 – 7, is a big failure, failing in its objective to attract tourists and visitors. It should be a lesson to the Johore Mentri Besar and all government officials that they should stop playing petty chauvinistic politics in economic development and tourist promotion.
The directive of the Johore State Government to ‘wipe out’ Chinese language characters of signboards of Chinese restaurants taking part in the Seafood Carnival is not only a grave violation of the constitutional rights of the Malaysian Chinese in the free use of their language, but defeats the very purpose of the Carnival in arousing public disgust and boycott as protest.
In March last year, the Federal Government spent millions of dollars to host the PATA Conference, to put Malaysia on the world tourist map. However, at the same time, the bombing, arson, rioting in Sabah was achieving the opposite effect, as the daily television reports of such lawlessness in Europe and the United States resulted in cancellation of bookings for the PATA Conference, giving world travelers serious doubt about Malaysia’s attraction as a tourist destination.
This has now happened with the Johore Seafood Carnival, with the Johore Government on he one hand spending money and effort to promote tourism, while at the same time, destroying its own efforts but also playing petty chauvinistic politics at the same time. When all Federal ad State leaders learn that they must stop such destructive and counter-productive activities?