News update

analysis With the Parliament being telecast live, the public is bound to wonder if Pakatan Rakyat can form a shadow cabinet. This concept is well-established in the United Kingdom where the opposition’s senior MPs take on shadow cabinet portfolios.Lim Kit Siang, as opposition leader in the 2004-2008 period, tried to form a shadow cabinet of sorts amongst DAP MPs but this attempt failed to achieve any momentum. There are a couple of reasons for this.Firstly, Lim, by virtue of his personality and his working style, inadvertently prevented other DAP MPs from enunciating their own policy positions on their portfolios. Many of them still looked up to Lim, a workhorse and an autodidact, for policy direction.Secondly, many of them probably felt that this was a waste of time given that they had little domain knowledge in the portfolios assigned to them and there was little chance that they could actually become actual ministers which such portfolios anyway.The equation has obviously changed after the recent general election. There are many more opposition MPs who can take on shadow cabinet portfolios and quite a few who can speak authoritatively on various issues, including finance, education and ICT, just to name a few. More importantly, the incentive for taking up these portfolios is much higher compared to before since there is a distinct possibility of Pakatan taking over government.The formation of a shadow cabinet will not be easy though. With various opposition leaders busy running five state governments, and with their head honcho, Anwar Ibrahim, pre-occupied with negotiating with potential crossovers from Barisan Nasional, it's entirely possible that they have not had time to properly sit down and discuss the creation of a shadow cabinet.We cannot discount the possibility we will not see the formation of a shadow cabinet anytime soon. This, we argue, would be a mistake for Pakatan. They should create one sooner rather than later, if they want to be taken seriously as a 'government-in-waiting'.We all saw the protracted negotiations involved in determining executive council positions in both Selangor and Perak which, together with royal intervention, held up the formation of the state governments in these two states. To avoid a repeat performance, it makes sense for Pakatan to make known, internally and externally, the possible allocation of cabinet portfolios if and when they come to power.Now, let's look at the possible options for forming a shadow cabinet. One obvious approach would be based on the UK model where there is one shadow finance minister, one shadow education minister, one shadow home minister and so on. This way, every minister on the government bench will have a counterpart on the opposition bench.There is some natural appeal to this approach as the public would like to know what a Pakatan cabinet would look like. In particular, people would want to compare and contrast it to the BN cabinet.Such a move would be fascinating and would no doubt generate plenty of discussion and debate amongst political analysts and journalists and in the coffee shops and online forums. But it would also unnecessarily hamper Pakatan as it would entail inevitably contentious negotiations for portfolios amongst the three parties.If one thought that the seat allocation process amongst the Pakatan parties were difficult and testy, imagine what shadow cabinet negotiations would be like, especially if you throw in potential crossover parties from Sabah and Sarawak into the mix.Contentious horse tradingA much better option would be for Pakatan to allocate shadow portfolios in a more liberal fashion whereby specific portfolios can be allocated to all three parties, which would then each identify its own MP to assume those portfolios.For example, there could be an MP each from PKR, DAP and PAS, responsible for higher education. Each could be given the flexibility of speaking out on different aspects of policy to do with public universities and private colleges. This model could be replicated for other portfolios.The downside of this approach, of course, is that sometimes, MPs from the different parties might disagree on different policy aspects within their respective portfolios. For example, DAP might be in favour of having a more meritocratic policy of admissions into public universities which takes into account of the fact that STPM exam is much harder than the matriculation exam while PKR or PAS might be in favour of maintaining the current system of admissions.However, the advantage of this approach, as opposed to a UK-style shadow cabinet, is that it allows Pakatan to avoid being bogged down with contentious horse-trading that would naturally entail in the formation of a one-to-one shadow cabinet. Instead of arguing over who gets what, in taking a more liberal approach, Pakatan can show that it indeed has ample expertise to form the next government.Whatever approach is taken, Pakatan has to form a shadow cabinet sooner rather than later, especially since it has gone on record as saying it would form the government by Sept 16 this year. The public would naturally want to know - and has a right to know - whether Pakatan MPs are capable of meeting the challenges at hand. There is no better way to let them know than by having a shadow cabinet.