by Tengku Razaleigh
(Speech at Kelab Umno Australia Seminar “Racial Integration and its Challenges” in Melbourne on Sunday 9th August 2009)
RACE: TIME FOR A NEW BEGINNING
Distance, home and reflection
1) The opportunity to study abroad is gift. I remember my days as a student in Belfast so long ago. Now as then, overseas study gives us the chance to be educated at some of the finest, best established institutions of higher learning anywhere, and to be exposed to the best that has been thought and done, and to measure ourselves against the highest standards. It is an opportunity to see the world.
2) Travel and living abroad takes us far away from home, but in doing so it also brings us closer to ourselves, and closer to home. Have you experienced this? Have you felt time and distance making you more conscious of how unique and precious the places, relationships, colours, smells and yes, tastes, of home are? Distance can help us see things more clearly. Home is such an immediate, dense and total experience that we often need to go away to see its contours. Home is such an emotional experience that we often understand it better in the coolness of distance. We sometimes need the elevation of distance to see the map of our own country.
3) I want to use this privileged distance that we now share, here in Melbourne, to speak frankly with you today about a matter that is usually so tightly wound up, so emotional, that at a national level we have not been able to have a rational discussion about it.
4) I want to invite you to look across this distance at the map of the life in common that we call our country. I want to look across the distance of fifty two years of independence, across changes over my own lifetime, to understand where we have come from as a nation and where we are going. My topic is race and racial consciousness in Malaysian life, and especially in our politics.
Race in the political life of Malaysia
5) Our social and political life is racialised to a degree seen in few other countries in the world. There are historical reasons for this. Malaysia was, at its birth, a country deeply divided along communal lines. We negotiated and attained independence with a power-sharing arrangement between the leaders of the three major racial communities as represented by the Alliance coalition. The agreement and cooperation of these leaders ensured peace and stability while we modernised our economy. The skill and integrity of these leaders, and their clear authority among their own communities was key to the success of this model, which is sometimes described by political scientists as consociational democracy.
6) This arrangement lasted only twelve years. After the traumatic riots of May 1969, we underwent a period of rule under the National Operations Council before Parliament was restored. The New Economic Policy was drafted and put into action. A new coalition, the Barisan Nasional, was put together to ensure that every community had a place at the table. Once more, the idea was to resolve conflict within a consociational power-sharing arrangement. Each community was to have a place at the table. Conflicts were to be solved between the leaders of these communities, behind closed doors. This arrangement was useful and effective for its time, but we have to wake up to the fact that it no longer works.
It is important to understand why:
7) It was never meant to be a permanent solution. Our method of racial power-sharing is primarily a system for resolving conflict in a deeply divided society. It was designed as an interim work-around, an early stage on the way to “a more perfect union” and not as the desired end-state. Over the years, however, we have put up barricades around our system as if it were a fore-ordained and permanent ideal. In doing so, we have turned a half-way house into our destination, as if we must forever remain a racially divided and racially governed society.
8) Instead, our ideal must be to become a free and united society in which individuals can express their ethnic and religious identities without being imprisoned in them. We must aim for a society in which public reasoning and not backroom dealing determines our collective decisions.
9) The power-sharing model that we started life with is an elite style of government justified by the virtue and competence of natural leaders of their communities. It needs special conditions. It does not work when political parties are led by the ignorant and the corrupt who have no standing in the communities they claim to represent.
10) It needs genuine agreement and cooperation between leaders who command support in their own communities and are universally respected. It will not work if the power-sharing coalition is overly dominated by one person and the others are there as token representatives. Our founding fathers negotiated, cooperated and shared responsibility as equals and as friends within a power-sharing framework. The communal interests they represented were articulated within the overarching vision of a united Malaysia. In the intervening years, as power came to be concentrated in the Executive, we preserved only the outward appearance of power-sharing. In reality we have had top-down rule and power has become increasingly unaccountable. Each of our political parties has also become more top-down, ruled by eternal incumbents who protect their position with elaborate restrictions on contests. Umno itself has become beholden to the Executive.
11) Our decades under highly-centralised government undermined our power-sharing formula, just as it undermined key institutions such as the judiciary, the police and the rule of law. Our major institutions have survived in appearance while their substance has eroded. Seen in this light, the election results of March 8, which saw the Barisan Nasional handed its worst defeat since 1969, was just the beginning of the collapse of a structure which has long been hollowed out.
The end of the old, but not quite the new
12) The racial power-sharing model now practiced by Barisan is broken. It takes more honesty than we are used to in public life to observe that this is not a temporary but a terminal crisis. An old order is ending. Our problem is that while this past winds down, smoothly or otherwise, the future is not yet here. We are caught in between. Despite our having become a more economically advanced society, with many opportunities for our citizens to express richly plural identities, our races have become increasingly polarised. Large numbers of our electorate still vote along ethnic and religious lines. Much of our political ground is still racially demarcated. Although we have made some progress towards truly multiracial politics, both the Government and the Opposition are largely mobilised along racial lines. It is not yet time to herald a new dawn. Instead, we are in a transition full of perils and possibilities.
13) You are this generation caught between. You are the generation of transition. You will play a key role in determining its outcome. However well a certain kind of politics of racial identity may have served to reduce conflict in the past, it has come to the end of its useful life. We need a new beginning to racial relations in Malaysia, and you must pioneer that beginning. We need to re-design race relations in Malaysia, and you must be the architects and builders of that design.
14) In coming to that new design I hope you take advantage of the perspective of distance that your overseas education has given you to not take as your starting point the tired answers that are passed on as conventional wisdom. You must reformulate the questions and come up with your own answers. When it is clear that one generation may have run out of steam, it is time to generate your own. Where do you begin? May I suggest some perspectives and principles. Whatever the answers we come up with, I think the following elements are important:
I. Begin with our common humanity. Respect our common humanity must override all lesser affiliations, including race. One of Islam’s most powerful contributions to human civilisation has been its insistence on the equality of all human beings. Islam tolerates no notions of racial superiority or inferiority. All human beings are equal before God. That same principle of equality is absolutely fundamental to democracy, and democracy is a foundational principle of our Constitution. Democracy is part of what makes us who we are as a nation. Even if we might still gravitate towards racial groupings, our allegiance to these groups must never overshadow our allegiance to the Constitution, and to the claims of equal dignity that it establishes firmly and permanently. Political parties based on race or religion must never be allowed to do or say anything contrary to justice and equality.
II. We must anchor ourselves in the Constitution and restore its primacy. This founding document of our country establishes definitively the equality of citizenship that is the bedrock of democracy. It gives us the framework of law and order within which we become a nation. It establishes the primacy of the rule of law, the sovereignty of Parliament, the independence of the judiciary and civil service and of our law enforcement agencies. These are the institutions which guarantee the freedom and sovereignty of the people.
III. We should acknowledge that while race is a category that unites people in common feeling, it can also divide, and divide disastrously. While it unites people who possess a set of social markers it often divides the same people from other communities. We should appreciate not just the fact that we are diverse but diverse in different ways. What I mean by this is that we are not diverse in the sense of being merely Malay, a Chinese, an Indian, a Kadazan, Iban and so forth. Each of us inhabits these particular identities in different ways. Each of us is not just a member of a race. There are other classifications which matter to us, such as location, class, social status, occupation, language, politics and others.
We would be terribly impoverished as persons if our identity was given ahead of time and once and for all merely by our membership of a fixed racial category. I would be a very dull person if you could tell who I was simply by looking up my race. We would never have unity if that is primarily how we regard one another. If you reflect on yourselves, you might find that all kinds of identity matter to you: that you are a graduate of such and such a university, that you speak these languages, support this football team, enjoy certain food or music, love to travel, can write computer code, have read such and such books, and have so-and-so as friends. Just reflect on how you identify yourselves in your facebook profiles. Is race the only thing you regard as important about yourselves? Is it the most important thing???
To expect our politics to be given by our race is to make cardboard images of ourselves, it is to retard our growth as individuals and hence as a society. Similarly to see no more of others than their race is to turn them into stereotypes and maintain a view of the world bordering on racist. I want to urge you, as the makers of the new social landscape we need in Malaysia, to reject taking race to be a unique and fixed categorisation, to reject race as a central category of social and political life.
a) Race is a constructed category, in the sense that people shape what they count as a “race” according to time, place and purpose. There is no unique and rigid concept of it the way there is a rigid concept of buoyancy, double-entry book-keeping, equilateral triangles and photosynthesis. I would be offended if you tried to measure and determine my racial identity, and it would tell me that there was something deeply wrong with your worldview. I am not Malay in the sense in which water is H2O.
b) Race is merely one among many identities we take up in life. We may not have much choice over how others categorise us, but we certainly have a choice about the relative importance to place on our own and therefore on the others’ racial identity. We have a choice in how much weight we put on it, and in how high in our scheme of values we put it. The contrast I want to draw is between the view that makes race out to be a unique and fundamental category, and a view that sees race as one out of many kinds of identification we could prioritise. If we see race as a watertight category, then you are either of race X or not, and everything else: your habits, thought-patterns, loyalties and politics must all follow from that. Then race becomes destiny. The politics of this kind of conception of race will always divide, and the ultimate solution to intra-racial problems it leads us to is, in the end, violence. It is easy to identify the practitioners of this kind of racial politics. They will rely on veiled threats of communal violence even as they take part in democratic politics.
However, if we understand that racial identity is just one of many identities we have to balance, then it becomes our duty as thinking persons to set relative priorities on all these identifications. We need to ask ourselves whether we want to draw our moral values and perspective from our common humanity or from our racial identity. As educated, reasoning people, we cannot but find our common humanity the more fundamental value. We cannot but find rationally chosen universal values more important than inherited tribal affiliations.
c) The ability to root ourselves in our common humanity first and foremost is the prerequisite for the development of a democratic society in which policies are decided by public reasoning rather than determined by violence and manipulation. This is because open public reasoning can only be carried out where there is equal respect for the dignity and rights of all citizens, and such respect must be firmly rooted in an understanding that despite sometimes clashing interests and identities, we are united by a more fundamental common identity: that of a shared humanity created by God. Our common humanity gives us moral obligations to one another, regardless of our lesser affiliations in a way that racial identity does not.?
IV. We need to arrive at new ways of mediating conflicting claims between the races, new ways of bringing people to the table, of including everyone in the decisionmaking process.
V. These new ways must be based on more open conceptions of who we are. Malaysia’s major races have lived together not just for decades but for centuries. Their cultures have interacted for millenia. In that time there has been mutual influence, admixture and cross-pollination at a depth and on a scale that our politics, popular culture and educational curriculum has largely pretended does not exist.
In my own parliamentary constituency, jungle covered, far inland and one of the most remote in the peninsula (it used to be known as Ulu Kelantan and covered half the state, and when I started there I had to travel to it by boat), is a six hundred year old Chinese community, perhaps the oldest in the peninsula, living in peace with their Malay and Orang Asli neighbours. Why pretend that we do not owe so much to each other that we would not be ourselves without each other? At the level at which people actually live we are already inextricably linked to each other.
It is time to embrace this real diversity in our political and personal lives. Our racial identities are not silos in a cornfield, forever separate, encased in steel, but trees in our rainforest: standing distinct but inexplicable without each other and constantly co-evolving.
16) While giving room to whoever wants to organise and advocate political interests according to our ethnic and religious affinities, we must now, very firmly, assert that such affinities must always recognise the priority and primacy of our common citizenship, our equal dignity, and above all, our common humanity before each other and before God. First we are human beings who are open to one another.
17) My young friends, I am not recommending anything novel. These are cardinal principle of our Constitution and the faiths we profess, most especially of Islam, and of reason itself. Let us have the sense of perspective to see our ethnic identities against these cornerstone principles of religion and ethics, and let us now educate our young, apprentice our youth, and conduct ourselves according to these principles. And then let us have a new beginning for Malaysia.
Follow can read to know more:
THE FEDERATION OF MALAYA CONSTITUTIONAL COMMISSION FEB 1957
http://www.digitalibrary.my/dmdocuments/malaysiakini/223_report%20of%20federation%20of%20malaya%20constitutional%20commission%20%201957.pdf
CONSTITUTIONAL PROPOSALS FOR THE FEDERATION OF MALAYA JUNE 1957
http://year006.tripod.com/constitutions_proposal_malaya_1957_searchable.pdf
“If you reflect on yourselves, you might find that all kinds of identity matter to you: that you are a graduate of such and such a university, that you speak these languages, support this football team, enjoy certain food or music, love to travel, can write computer code, have read such and such books, and have so-and-so as friends. Just reflect on how you identify yourselves in your facebook profiles. Is race the only thing you regard as important about yourselves? Is it the most important thing?”
Very profound reflection on how we look at ourselves, Ku Li. You truly shows a great understanding of this whole issue of racial polarisation that’s taking place in Malaysia. Hope there are sensible and rational people in Umno who could grasp what you are expounding and follow your lead.
In BN, corruption and abuse of power rule.
The question about how his listeners identified themselves on Facebook was craftsman-like. There are elements of the speech I’m not comfortable with, and even felt excluded some Malaysians, but it has to be remembered who he was speaking to.
I can’t help wondering what he imagines his role in UMNO is. Is there one single other voice in UMNO that sounds like him? If his party is in terminal decline and he sees race as the prime reason for it, on what basis does he remain loyal to it? Is he about to propose a United Malaysians National Organisation and incorporate MCA, MIC, and all the other in-breeding parties?
I think Ku Li, LKS and Karpal should start a 4th Pakatan Rakyat party – maybe the “Independence Party” or “Malaysian Heritage Party” or something similar. Finish the job the Alliance and the then-Rulers started, and make Malaysia a nation all Malaysians can be proud of.
Malaysian politics is mired in historical problems: none of the current political parties are free of confounding stereotypes. If UMNO is in terminal decline, no other political party is doing much better than perpetuating old habits. I think it’s slowing the process of change. Even if a conscientious, reasonable politician in BN wants to make Malaysia a better place, the alternative platforms suffer almost as much negative opinion as UMNO does. The delaying effect of negative opinion would be worse from their traditionally UMNO-supporting friends.
KuLi seems to be the only politician who has the guts to speak out and also with a lot of level headed comments.
LKS and Karpal cannot do this. Neither can DSAI. Ita sad. Is this not sad? KuLi dares to speak out against UMNO. LKS and DSAI are not speaking out clearly against problems within DAP or PKR or even PR.
When can Malaysia have a new beginning? I think not in this generation. Maybe the next or the one after. We are after all too selfish. Time that PR starts with a new generation like how China did it. Indoctrinate the kids of today.
An eminent individual wasting himself in a barrel of rotten apples, and refusing to move out of the barrel.
Saint … this person knows PR is getting no where. Also, by being in UMNO he can say a lot and its effective, if anything. From outside he will be called a NOBODY or traitor.
Look at Zaid, so what? No one cares. Look at DrM, when he was not a PM, so what? Look at Chu Jui Meng, BN trash … PKR takes in trash only to prop themselves up. DSAI is a rubbish collector and uses that rubbish to call it a VICTORY.
That does not work. A political party needs to show it is capable. Not that it has one or two heroes.
Look at the Japanese in WWII, their Zero was the best fighter, they did not want to change it and did not train better pilots. They lost air supremacy in a couple of years.
All talk and no substance. Unless KuLi leaves the doomed Umno and join PR all these calming rethoric is hot air! He cannot even get enough nominations within his own party to be an effective instrument of change, so how to talk? PR should ask him to join them again. Get Zaid to ask nicely. Afterall, isn’t what he wrote the same ideals as AI’s speeches during the GE?
A great leader sells HOPE. A rubbish collector leader like DSAI will hammer, insult, challenge etc only. Where are the dreams and hopes for the nation? His only dream and hope is to overthrow BN and be PM. Is that what we want in a leader who will later leave something for our kids?
Pastaman … name me 2 PR leader who dare speak up against the wrongs within, really speak up clearly.
pastaman,
PR becoming underword and underneath….by Dec PR will split to another group PR 2….
A good man, but he who found no room in umno. he could not win the nomination as umno president.
he is perhaps right. those umno leaders who did not study overseas could not see the picture well. they see the trees only and not the forest.
Pulau Sibu … those who did study overseas like in Oxford also the same la. HHO was not a local grad is he? Even if he were he is MAD nowadays, when he was a lawyer, such a gentleman. Power corrupts … DSAI is crazy for it.
Look at PR … Jeff Ooi … simple mistake will not apologise. Look at Ronnie Liu, simple thing wanna come down so hard on people. We live in a pond, there are ripples to what we do. These people are all IDIOTS, not statesmen, people from the streets who talk like in coffee shops.
You got clerks, bloggers and small boys who held a camera at the right place who are now ADUN and MPs. You think they know how to govern a state? That is why DAP is on top … they have old guard la. People who have been in it for a long time.
DSAI? Recruit sampah la …
We should be at least thankful to this good man, with his open minded he is trying to open those selfish, jealousy and narrow minded Malaysians for a better Malaysia.
The best solution to all our problems is to dump UMNO/BN.
YB Kit,
Some pro-DAP commentators in this blog already started to question DSAI’s capability to bring PR component parties together in order to create a long-lasting party unity. I think it is time for DAP to take stock on the winning chances of DAP in the next General Election if the present quarrelsome situation of PR is to be lingered upon.
Please read on the recent comment of PR’s big enemy, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, on the weaknesses of PR. Perhaps Muhyiddin Yassin’s comment will help DAP leaders to do retrospection inside their own hearts and help DAP to find a much more clear-cut direction for DAP to move ahead in the future – such as on the matter of whether DAP wants to continue befriend PAS or just wants to take the big pain to cut off the relationship with PAS as soon as possible before the emotional attachment between both fundamentally different component parties already goes too tie, too serious and too detrimental for an immediate breakup between both component parties before the next General Election.
Extract from The Malaysian Insider report on 09 August 2009:
‘The Barisan Nasional (BN) deputy chairman said PR was merely a loose coalition unlike the BN, which had an effective constitution and practised collective responsibility.’
‘“I had seen the cracks from early on. They (the components) are unable to agree on many things, which is having a very negative effect on the people,” he said.’
‘As such, he said, the people should be aware and understand that they should not be sacrificing their and children’s future by supporting PR just because they were dissatisfied or did not agree on some issues.’
‘The BN, Muhyiddin said, was always taking steps to improve itself and correct whatever weaknesses it may have.’
‘“Don’t sacrifice the future just because you have been promised the sun, moon and stars,” he said.’ (The Malaysian Insider)
“Why pretend that we do not owe so much to each other that we would not be ourselves without each other?” (Ku Li)
I can tell you why, Ku Li. The reason is because Barisan Nasional has gotten too habitual used to the racist approach for purpose of soliciting the communal votes during the General Election – Umno wants Malay votes, MCA wants Chinese votes, MIC wants Indian votes, and Gerakan wants localism-minded Penangites’ votes. Because of the long existence racist elements found in Umno, the security forces such as the Police Force and the MACC have to end up to be identified as the Malay institutions by Umno think-tanks in order to incite racist emotion among the Malay community in favour of Umno – in the name of “Ketuanan Melayu” (Malay Supremacy).
“At the level at which people actually live we are already inextricably linked to each other.” (Ku Li)
You are right, Ku Li. The best inter-racial link can be created through inter-marriages, as proven by your own marriage to a Chinese Singaporean girl.
Tengku,
In a very pleasant winter day in Melbourne today where the sun was shining and the crisp cool breeze was blowing, you had wasted your time with the BTN-hardened hardcore members of the Kelab UMNO Australia in Melbourne. The values that you articulated so well and your urgings, I am sad to say, have all come to nought. In a sense, it is like the Malay saying – H2O running off the duck’s back.
With all due respect, you could have just stood at the corner of Swanston and LaTrobe Streets and spruik to the hordes of students of international background (many of them Malaysians too) busy making their way to RMIT open-day and they would have listened, understood and appreciated your well-meant speech. Those Malaysian students would have cheered you loudly for they know the astronomical sums of money their parents have to fork out for their overseas education – just because they are of the wrong race. I am not sure if the same can be said about those who attended your speech at K.U.A.
hen we talk of civil servant it is Ali .
When we talk of business it is Alibaba.
Are we not fed up with race?
We are all fed up with the profligacy of RM30 trillions of the Alibaba and the 40 thieves.
So if we still want to talk of race, let it be a new Government of Babali with Interim Government for Good Governance IGGG minus the 40 thieves and more.
Go there for the answers :-
http://forum.cari.com.my/redirect.php?goto=findpost&pid=32841791&ptid=312511
pw: sketch ERIC
slow, very slow…that is what is wrong..with people like goli
why didnt he speak up in the club 46 days
why now, and of all places in melb
Just like all these clowns wasting our youth and time
And if you clowns are contemplating of another similar mechanism for the next govt, forget it…first return the respect to those who has made the formative years of this nation
Race is not an issue, interest is. Without article 153, fake Malays would not have any interest to claim to be Malays; and without Mahathir calling himself Malay, racism would not be as bad as it is today.
NEP was needed to cover up the real cause of May 13. TDM made NEP enrich his cronies, and to remain in power forever through money politics. Now UMNO leaders treat NEP as their blood, and ordinary Malays treat NEP as the sweat-less means to power and wealth.
It is a myth that multi-racial country cannot live in peace without the government doing the balancing act; Tengku Razaleigh said as much in his talk. Quote: In my own parliamentary constituency, jungle covered, far inland and one of the most remote in the peninsula (it used to be known as Ulu Kelantan and covered half the state, and when I started there I had to travel to it by boat), is a six hundred year old Chinese community, perhaps the oldest in the peninsula, living in peace with their Malay and Orang Asli neighbours. Unquote.
But Mahathir thought that only country whose citizens have multi-blood-mix can be called multiracial; he did not consider Singapore a multiracial country. He declared that a multiracial country has a problem with peace, as though Ulu Kelantan is outside Malaysia.
When the government leaders can make use of an issue to cover up their misdeeds, they will not fail to use them. When the majority of the people can gain advantage on a certain government policy over the minority, the country is divided. When the people are divided, they would be busy getting involved in making sure that their interest is protected, rather than to work for living and contribute to the social and economic development of the country.
Race and religion are not a problem. They become one when they are utilised to advance the interest of the group of divided people. Until and unless those in the majority who believed that they had gained, such as through 153 and NEP, realised that they were actually worse off compared to an environment when all people are equal, and those in power have to account for the actions and the resources of the nation, such as in Singapore where the government works for national interest, and choose to stop ganging up by race or religion, the racial and religious polarisation will remain. Unfortunately religion is the foundation for the classification of Malays and thus is politicised.
The new beginning should be made by UMNO past leaders; it is best if UMNO can be split into two. For the country to have a new beginning, amendment should be made to article 153 and 160 of the constitution.
TRH was playing piano to cows
Wasting time and effort
Why all these politicians ran to Australia at this time? Muhyiddin is also in Australia.
Wasn’t there travel ban after the economic crisis, and these people are still enjoying their life by wasting people’s money?
Hi Onlooker Politics, inter-racial marriages are working pretty good in the UK and the USA. As they keep religions above politics. Can Malaysia do it ?. You and Ku Li should know that in Malaysia our malays/muslims brothers and sisters are governed by religious act which prevented them to practise the freedom of religion.How can you guys expect any harmomious inter-racial marriages when one (non-muslim) is forced to convert to Islam .
Wot a powerful speech delivered by kuli in kelab umno australia. He chose umno club for a purpose for he recognised that umno is the root of all problems – not our countrymen and women, the malays. To kill a snake you have to strike at its head. That is what he is doing. And he targetted young people which is a commendable move. They are more receptive and being resident (for the time being as students or for what ever reasons) in a fully democratic country, they are exposed to better ideas and practices. And more importantly, he must have hoped that members in that audience (coming from the umno club) have not acquired or tasted instant and guaranteed success and enormous wealth like the umnoputras now infesting the country and destroying it. In other words sitting in the audience are not people who are not likely to have vested interests or totally fixed and pre-(or is it mis?)conceived ideas.
Kuli is working hard for the country. Not a bad idea for him to remain in umno for he then can work for change and a better tomorrow for all of us from within the devils’ workshop. To all umnoputras who have their palms fully greased and their pot bellies concealing their little toes and their 50,000sqft palace as hide-aways, kuli would surely stick out as a real enemy within. But never fear kuli. Umnoputras by and large ould neither match your language ability nor your intellect nor your sincerity nor your patriotism. They are a band of umno’s (-)meritocracy purebreds. And more importantly, I dont believe they have the guts to seefour your body or protect you under isa.
THIS IS A DAMN GOOD SPEECH. I have not heard one like this coming from UMNO/BN for a long long time. Honestly, have not heard one like this since probably Tun Razak time..
A lot of raw honesty. Not highly inspirational but still a good dose. Very good choices of words, good sentence construct, good composition.
Najib speechwriters and expensive PR people are crap compared to a piece like this…
BigJoe … this one comes from the heart. Can DSAI speak like this? If not, we have no hope la …
I hope Kuli delivered his speech in Malay, cos these days, students “no understanding the England” much….!
I could almost take personal offence, being one of the committee members of Kelab UMNO Melbourne myself.
Regardless of personal feelings regarding the organizers of this event, the essence of his speech is one that needs to be taken on board by everyone.
Tengku Razaleigh came to Melbourne at our invitation, the invitation of Kelab UMNO Australia Melbourne. We invited him, of all people, because we believed he was the best person to speak candidly about the division that is simmering underneath the surface, and I personally believe that each and every one of us is subject to our own prejudices – and it is important that we realize what they are, face them head on and DO something about it, not just sit back and talk about stereotypes. The racial divide is not something we can ignore, but we are all able to do something about it. At the end of the day, we are all Malaysians, regardless of whether we are Malay, Chinese, Indian or the many numerous other races born of our soil.
For those who were not there, the attendees were evenly broken down between races and religion, and invitations were extended to all Malaysians in Melbourne to the best of the the organizers’ capabilities.
Despite our name, Kelab UMNO Australia Melbourne has always opened our events to all Malaysians, and we hope in the future to continue organizing events such as these – events integral in addressing the issues that lie beneath the surface head on, and we believe that the Malaysians in Melbourne, regardless of race or religion, are all working towards the same goal – enlightenment, integration and progress.