Guess which Malaysian MP ponteng Parlimen the most…

The answer is Miri MP Dr. Michael Teo Yu Keng from PKR, who attended 11 out 60 parliamentary seatings between July 26 2021 to March 7 2022.

Edit: CILISOS and MyMP have been informed that Dr. Michael Teo has a medical condition that prevented him from attending parliament over the past few months.

MyMP has confirmed this with YB Fahmi Fadzil (59/60 attendance), so we have edited the title and removed his picture from the featured image. However, this also further emphasizes the importance of transparency of Parliamentary attendance mentioned later in this article.

This information came from the nice people at MyMP (article about them here), who have been tracking our MP punya attendance for the past 8 months.

Unfortunately they aren’t allowing us to make their entire document available (yet) but gave us permission to use screenshots of it in this article.

So, now that you know who had the lowest attendance, we bet you’re wondering who had the highest. Well, here are some of the main stats upfront:

 

26 MPs had FULL attendance

Data screencapped directly from the Excel sheet provided by MyMP. All party affiliations are correct as of January 29 2020. If wrong please let us know ya. 

 

30 MPs had less than HALF attendance

Same disclaimer as above. 

 

AMANAH is the party with the HIGHEST average attendance

To calculate this, we averaged out the attendance by dividing the total number of attendances with the number of MPs from each party (unkatak-ed as of January 29th 2020). We went with AMANAH because although UPKO had a 100% attendance, they only had one MP. Same with MUDA.

Also, we decided not to group these parties by coalition because whats the point it keeps changing we felt the information is more granular when it’s broken down by party. Also also, BEBAS is not a political party. It refers to independent candidates.

So now that you know what the numbers are, you might be asking “Well, what’s the big deal?”. Fair warning, things are gonna get aggravating.

 

MPs don’t need to give reasons for not showing up

If you’re a pemakan gaji like many of us, you’d know that a low attendance is something that’s gonna get you in trouble – try not showing up at work for two weeks without a valid reason, and you’ll find your career path turning into a jobstreet.

A great example for the importance of attendance is the recent SOSMA vote, which would extend the police’s ability to detain someone for a longer period of time in the interest of national security. This extension didn’t happen because it lost by 2 votes – 86 to 84.

So, if you’re in the camp that believes SOSMA strengthens Malaysia’s national security, then imagine how you’d feel knowing that your MP could have tipped that scale if only they showed up. And this becomes more poignant after you know that some of the MPs who didn’t show include those belonging to the current coalition that proposed this in the first place.

At the same time, there could be reasons for an MP being absent, such as an emergency in their constituency, MPs who are also ministers being busy with minister things, or simply not feeling well.The problem is that, unlike work or school, reasons for being absent aren’t required even though the issue of pontenging MPs have been brought up at almost every parliament seating regardless of which coalition or party is in charge. Sometimes, it’s even defended:

“We have discussed about it in Cabinet meeting, we found that sometimes the ministers have to be overseas, as there are many international meetings that they need to attend.” – ex-ex-PM Dr. Mahathir, as quoted by The Edge

As for the non-Minister MPs, sometimes they’re around the Parliament doing…uh… non-Minister MP things:

“As for normal MPs, they have their own issues to deal with, although they are not in Dewan sometimes, they are in the Parliament building, so [the Speaker] can ring the bell and ask them to attend Dewan Rakyat sitting [when there is a lack of quorum]” – ex-ex-PM Dr. Mahathir, as quoted by The Edge

As an FYI, a quorum is the minimum number of MPs needed for the Dewan Rakyat to start proceedings. That number for now is 26 and yes, sometimes you can’t even get 26 out of 222 MPs.

 

But wait, attendance is only half the story

Going back to the analogy of office work, you’d likely also be familiar with another kind of co-worker – the one who comes in on time, never takes leave, but never actually does anything. And this is where the other function of an MP in Parliament comes in – asking questions about how the country is being run.

This is a session in Parliament known as Question Time (QT), where any MP can ask any minister questions regarding government policies and bills in discussion, and the minister MUST answer them. This is to (idealistically & theoretically) ensure that ministers are held responsible, accountable, and transparent on their policies and decisions. In a way, this is another gauge to assess how involved your MP is beyond just showing up. 

MyMP actually reports the number of questions an MP asks as an RPG stat scale, although bear in mind that the stats on the site were last updated on July 26 2021 – the stats we mentioned above haven’t been reflected in the site yet. So, for example, although Mahfuz Omar had a full attendance, he only asked one question about employers making fake claims for salary subsidies.

In contrast, Khairy Jamaluddin asked 13 questions despite only attending 24 sessions.   

Well, the importance of your MP asking questions is really up to you, so this could be a meaningful or meaningless stat. But if you want to see whether your MP is a Main Character or an NPC, you can look it up here.

 

You get what you vote for, and MyMP is helping to keep the receipts

Actually, one continual problem has always been a lack of transparency. In fact, MyMp volunteers have to manually keep track of attendance because there isn’t a publicly accessible attendance sheet. Here’s what it looks like:

Here’s what Chak, the founder of MyMP and (for transparency) former Cilisosbos had to say:

“A lot of MPs don’t stay the whole day. Some journalists also say they come in just to mark attendance. We tried to monitor the live session with a bunch of volunteers via the YouTube live stream, but it was unsuccessful because the camera angles don’t cover all the seats.”

If you think about it, the YB honorific that stands for “Yang Berhormat” should more accurately stand for “Yang Berkhidmat” because you voted for them to represent you. So whether that translates to your MP coming down to help out during a flood without a boatload of photographers, bringing up issues that are important to you, or pushing/resisting certain laws; they should – idealistically and theoretically – be representing the best interests of the people who voted them in, which would be…

So yea, click here if you want to be a MyMP volunteer.