Anwar slams 'dirty tricks' in Malaysia poll

Former deputy prime minister of Malaysia Anwar Ibrahim has told ABC's Radio National that the country's upcoming elections will be marred by voting irregularities.

The Malaysian Government called general elections 14 months ahead of schedule and Dr Anwar says the early poll is a dirty trick designed to keep him out of the running.

The opposition leader is banned from politics until April due to a corruption conviction.

Dr Anwar says the vote will be flawed and media coverage of the election has been totally unbalanced.

"Do you know that not one report about me in the media, in the government-controlled media or an entire mainstream media in this country," he said.

"There's a complete ban, a blackout, and yet you call it free and fair elections."

Malaysia is in heightened ferment as it moves towards a snap election called for next Saturday by the Prime Minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

No one remotely sees Abdullah's ruling Barisan Nasional (National Front) coalition at any risk of losing power, and the odds are long that it will even fall below the two-thirds majority in parliament needed to change the rules of the game.

WHEN Penny Wong made the federal ministry in the new Rudd Government and immediately began playing a pivotal role in the Bali global warming conference, there were gasps in Malaysia as well as at home.

"When a Sabah-born woman became an elected minister in Australia, that caused a lot of buzz around here," says Rehman Rashid, opinion editor at Kuala Lumpur's New Straits Times.

"That she could go further in Australian politics than she could in her own country."

Malaysians see themselves doing well by regional comparisons - under Mahathir their per capita income quadrupled while population doubled - but some wonder whether they, like Penny Wong, wouldn't have got further in similar-sized but more liberal countries such as Australia or Canada.

Mahathir blurred state and corporate entrepreneurship in wasteful and often corrupt cronyism and used detention-without-trial powers to frighten critics.

He also subverted two important institutions of governance: the rotating monarchy among Malaysia's nine traditional sultans, and the previously respected judiciary.

Both institutions are now reasserting themselves.

Abdullah was forced recently to set up a commission of inquiry into the judiciary when videotapes showed an UMNO power broker-lawyer fixing jobs on the country's most senior legal bench in cahoots with a business tycoon, Vincent Tan.

Better educated than their playboy fathers, a new generation of sultans is "stepping up to this noblesse oblige thing.

The internet and satellite television have broken down UMNO's monopoly over conventional media - three leading bloggers are running as opposition candidates - but only a fifth of Malaysians have access to the net, with rural Malays lagging. Tan, the controversial tycoon, has just bought the main alternative newspaper, The Star.

Even Malaysia's Election Commission chief, Abdul Rashid Abdul Rahim, says that one-sided press and TV campaign coverage makes the whole system a "laughing stock". An opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, goes further, saying the electoral rolls are crammed with phantom voters, including "thousands" aged over 100 in each constituency.

The election date is part of the rigging, Anwar claims with some justification.

(Excerpts from smh.com.au :"Malaysians question cost of stability"-Hamish McDonald Asia-Pacific Editor.