What to be done shall a new government is elected?
As writing this, I am currently following the live reports on Malaysiakini. It came to my thinking, shall a new government is elected out of this general election, what will they need to do? Optimistic thinking? Maybe, but judging how the opposition currently leading (unless, of course, you‘ve been tuning to RTM at this time) the votes counting thus far, it is not impossible.
Update: I started writing this around 8:00PM before went to eat. Hence, the projection of opposition’s possible majority in parliament. So on the new government thingy, till next general election, I guess. By then, I will be voting. Postal vote tell ya. How cool is that? 
Shall BN fail to retain majority in the parliament, DAP, PAS and PKR have to first and foremost, merge in a coalition in order to form a legitimate majority. This crucial step can be the most gruesome part of the whole process of forming the new government. A lot of questions will arise. The most important one would be: who will be the leader of the coalition? Should he/she be the leader of the party that won the most number of seats, in total or in proportion? Should he be Anwar, since he is right now the “it person, capital I-T”? Should they adopt the BN model where one party dominant over the struggling others? Should they embrace true democracy with regards to forming leadership of the coalition? Should they instead have leaders from each party, on equal standing, co-preside the coalition?
Next, the coalition, after settling down with the leadership issue, will need to form a cabinet. Who to perform in which portfolio might not be a problem. They have got the best people in various fields. However, to form a unified cabinet with streamlined policies can be an extremely difficult task. Each party in the coalition has its own vested interest and will attempt to shape the cabinet policies to their liking. PAS will definitely pursue its Islamic state agenda, in the open or otherwise. DAP will try to DAP-ize all Malaysians where each and everyone is equal and not better than other, which is good, but going to make some people unhappy, especially those who had been enjoying so much under BN government policies favouring the Malays. PKR will obviously be playing the “Anwar says” game. Haven’t they been worshipping Anwar Ibrahim all this while anyway?
This has never been a problem in Barisan Nasional cabinet as UMNO supersedes other parties. The president of UMNO, who eventually is the coalition party president and the prime minister, will make final decisions on practically all cabinet policies. One way to make all parties to be unified is by adopting an agreement on fundamental principles of the government, which must be based on universally accepted values. It is something like the social contract that BN people have been talking (out of proportion) about but social contract is actually a different concept than what I am talking about. The agreement can be something like the People’s Declaration championed by the People’s Parliament. It must be documented and upheld at all time.
Once the coalition achieved both things above, the next task would be to commit in institutional reform. The new government will be under enormous obligation to replace all bad laws and policies of the previous government. An active constitutional reform, or rather reversal, is necessary. Unconstitutional laws like the Internal Security Act, University and College University Act and Police Act, just to name a few, need to be replaced. There are so many loopholes in the law, the Official Secret Act for example, allowing corruption to take place. A new level of confidence has to be instilled in the judiciary while the Lingam scandal is still warm (and before we forget about it). The new government have to look into other institutional reforms concerning the police force, the Anti-Corruption Agency, the Election Commission and other independent bodies that are currently not-so-independent; and into powers of religious departments, of Rela, etc.
There are many economic policies that need a revision especially those relating to distribution of wealth and subsidies. The new government need to face the problem of high inflation growth and have to keep up to their election promises ensuring no highway toll hike and no fuel hike, which in my opinion, the latter one is unachievable. The new government have to come out with an effective mechanism to handle escalating crime rate. On education, they have to close the gap between rural and urban areas. All in all, they need to rebuild everything from scratch and look at each aspect of governing some 25 millions people from the bigger picture.
Lastly, what they need to do are maintaining good performance and popularity as well as ensuring peace and stability. In order to make sure all such reforms in governance come to fruition, they must hold power in government long enough. To do so, they cannot afford to lose in following election especially the immediate next general election, unless they go corrupt like the present government. After all, election process is a popularity contest. To win, you just have to make everyone happy. The BN government have maintained a reasonable level of “peace” and “stability” and over the past 50 years, alluring foreign investments and topping world charts on all sorts of things. The new government have to do better so that we need not to lose out to other countries at eyes of world. In the end of the day, what others think of us is the only thing that matters, isn’t it?