Speech Parliamentary Opposition Leader, DAP Secretary-General and MP for Petaling, Lim Kit Siang, when speaking at the Taiping DAP branch Dinner in Taiping on Friday, 30th January 1981 at 8 p.m.
Call on the Government to treble the intake of non-buniputra students for medical places for next year’s academic year.
Throughout the country hospital, the government faces an acute shortage of doctor and in particular, specialists. Every year, Malaysia has to recruit doctors from Indonesia, India and Bangladesh, countries which need doctors even more than Malaysia, to help fill some of the vacancies in Malaysia hospitals.
One of the way to overcome the acute shortage of doctors in the government service is to improve on the conditions of service of the doctors and specialists, in particular with regard to their promotional and higher education prospects.
The promotional prospects of medical officers are far inferior to those of MCS officers. Although there were some rectification exercise in recent tiems, the promotional gap between medical officers and MCS officers are still too great to induce medical doctors to remain in service.
In fact, I understand that certain promotional exercise to rectify glaring injustices for long-serving medical officers approved before the death of the former Director of Medical Services, Tan Sdri. Dr. Pillay, have now been frozen, causing further discontentment in the medical service.
I hope the Minister of Health, Tan Sri Choy Hong Nyan, would look into this and allow the promotional exercises to continue as originally approved.
Another way to overcome the acute shortage of medical doctors is to increase the intake of medical students locally and overseas. In this connection, there is a need to have a greater intake of non-buniputra students for the medical courses in University of Malaya and University Kebangsasn.
Last academic year, the university intake of the two medical faculties at the local universities were:
Bumiputeras Non-Bumiputeras Total
University Kebangsaan Malaysia 173 19 192
90.1% 9.9%
University of Malaya 80 48 128
62,5% 37.5%
The intake of non-bumiputra students into the medical courses is clearly too low and inadequate, and should be trebled next year. I call on the Minister of Education to give attention to this, and to rectify this imbalance of intake into the medical course.
This is all the more important with further reports of another 20% increase of school fees for foreign students in the United Kingdom.Even before the further university fee increase, a U.K medical course would cost a student some $250,000, and if all the present doctors had been required to pay $250,000 before they could qualify, then probably there would have been very few doctors in Malaysia today.
DAP to work doubly hard to re-establish itself in Taiping
Although the DAP won the Klian Pauh seat in Taiping in the last two general elections, we have now lost the seat because of the defection of Lim Eng Chuan who had stood on the DAP platform and ticket.
The case of Lim Eng Chuan highlights the problems the DAP faces as an opposition party. In the 15 years of the DAP’s political struggle, various DAP leaders had betrayed the Party for a variety of reasons.
Some of them had fallen victim to the temptations of the Barisan Nasional for personal, material gain; other have developed material appetites which they could not satisfy in the DAP; while yet others have allowed their egoism and selfishness to break them away from the mainstream of the DAP.
Recently, the Malaysian Government put the Chairman of the Malayan Communist Party, Musa Ahamd, on Television; and although the Government wants the people to believe that the Malaysia authorities sent against into Communist China to snatch Musa Ahmad from Communist Chinese control, very few would believe this story. Whatever it may be, there is no doubt that Musa Ahmad’s return to Malaysia and appearance and confession on Television Malaysia represented a major coup for the Home Affair Minister, Tan Sri Ghazalie Shafir.
The case of the MCP Secretary-General before Chin Peng, Loi Tek, is another famous example. As MCP Secretary-General, Lot Tek was the master spy, who was a treble agent, for the French, the British and the Japanese, and was responsible for the Batu Caves Incident during the Japanese Occupation where he summoned a meeting of MCP military chief at Batu Caves, but was himself absent. But present were the Japanese forces who massacred the MCP chieftains who turned up for the meeting.
The Musa Ahmad reminds all Malaysian that the Special Branch has a special department which is aimed at controlling and interfering with the activities of organisations and political parties, and not just Malayan Communist Party. The Labour Party was infiltrated with Special Branch element causing the break-up of the Party.
In the same way as the Special Branch had infiltrated the Labour Party, would want to infiltrated the DAP. The DAP must therefore be doubly vigilant that we do not allow ourselves to become a second Labout Party, allowing the infiltrated element to engineer division and dissensions inside the Party to destroy the DAP.
For Taiping, the DAP will work doubly hard to regain and re-establish in itself in Taiping.
The betrayals of one individual or group cannot deflect the DAP from its march ahead toward the mobilisation of Malaysians behind the sacred goal of a democratic socialist, Malaysian Malaysia.