by Parliamentary Opposition Leader, DAP Secretary-General and MP for Tanjung, Lim Kit Siang, in Penang on Wednesday, March 11, 1992:
What has Housing and Local Government Minister, Dr. Ting Chew Peh been doing for the past 17 months that he has only now realized about the seriousness of the long-standing problem of the delay in the issuance of certificate of fitness (CFs)
I have gone on public record as saying that the Ministry of Housing and Local Government is probably the most incompetent and inefficient Federal Ministry in Malaysia.
This judgment is confirmed again and again by the speeches and statements by the Minister for Housing and Local Government,, Dr. Ting Chew Peh, who did not realise that the more he talks, the more he is inadvertently confessing his ignorance and his Ministry’s incompetence.
For instance, a few days ago, Dr. Ting Chew Peh seems to have just made a new discovery about the problem of the delay in the issuance of certificate of fitness (CFs) for house buyers and he declared that the standard sale and purchase agreement may be amended to solve this problem.
The more important question is what had Dr. Ting Chew Peh been doing as Minister for Housing and Local Government for the past 17 months that he did not know about the gravity of this problem until last week, when he announced the formation of a special committee under the Deputy Housing
Minister, Osu Haji Sukam, to study the prob¬lem.
Dr. Ting Chew Peh has fallen on his job as Minister for Housing and Local Government.
This is a scandalous reflection on Dr. Ting Chew Peh, the Minister of Housing and Local Government, for he has clearly fallen on his job. If Dr. Ting Chew Peh had spent more time on the Ministry of Housing and his energies in tackling the housing problem in the coun¬try, instead of wasting taxpayers’ money in the MCA’s propaganda campaign of lies and falsehoods, Dr. Ting would have been a better and more effective Minister for Housing and Local Government.
Dr. Ting’s ignorance about the long-standing CFs problem is also a scandalous reflection on the professional standards and exper¬tise of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government that it could allow its Minister to be so uninformed about a long -standing housing problem with a history going back for over a decade!
Dr. Ting’s statement that the standard house sale and pur¬chase agreement may be amended to solve the problem of the delay in issuance of certificates of fitness (CFs) is a very strange one.
Is Dr. Ting proposing that the local authorities become a third party in the standard sale and purchase agree¬ment, and can be held liable for damages for any delay in the issue of CFs?
Can Dr. Ting explain how the amendment to the standard sale and purchase agreement could solve the problem of delay in the issue of CF’s?
The standard sale and purchase agreement ‘binds the buyer’ and the housing developer, but it does not affect the local authorities, who are one of the major causes of the delay in the issue of CFs.
Is Dr. Ting proposing that the local authorities should now become a third party in the standard sale and purchase agreement, whereby the local authorities could be held liable for damages for any delay in the issue of CFs for which it is responsible?
DAP would support such proposal, making the local authori¬ties a third party in the standard sale and purchase agreement, where¬by it would be liable for damages for delay on its part in the issue of
CF’s.
In fact, this is probably the most effective way to over¬come the problem of the delay in the issue of CF’s by local authori¬ties, especially if officials of local authorities are also made personally liable to reimburse the local authorities for damages it had to pay under such an amendment to the standard sale and purchase agreement.
The house buyer is the victim in any late delivery of houses due to delay in the issuance of certificate of fitness (CF’s), whether this be the fault of the housing developer or the local au-thorities.
A Housing Minister who understands this basic fact would never have issued a warning to house buyers who have been delivered the keys to the houses by the housing developers that they could not move into the houses until the CFs are issued by the local authori¬ties.
This shows that Dr. Ting Chew Peh simply does not understand the magnitude of the housing needs and problems in the country, and completely unsympathetic to the hardships faced by the house-buyers as a result of the passing-of-the-buck between housing developers and the local authorities.