Bangi MP Ong Kian Ming said the bill that will be tabled in the Dewan Rakyat will likely involve a number of constitutional amendments.
They include restrictions on the freedom of association for elected representatives (Article 10), not preventing an elected representative who has resigned his or her position the opportunity to stand again in a by-election (Article 49), putting in conditions by which an elected MP will lose his or her seat if party hopping takes places (Article 49A) and putting these conditions in place in the state constitutions (Eight Schedule).
Ong said that if these constitutional amendments were in place before February 2020, the “Sheraton Move”, which saw the collapse of the Pakatan Harapan government, would not have taken place.
“Firstly, all of the Umno MPs who left their party after GE14 to join Bersatu would have their seats declared vacant and by-elections would have been held in each of these seats,” he said in a statement today.
“Of course, knowing that their seats would be automatically vacated if they left Umno to join another party, it is likely that these MPs would not have left.
“Similarly, the MPs who left PKR to join Bersatu as part of the Sheraton Move would not have wanted to leave knowing that they would have to face the electorate in a by-election in their respective seats.”
In May, law minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar had said the anti-hopping law would not prevent another “Sheraton Move”, citing several provisions which would not be part of the proposed amendments to the constitution.
Ong noted that there were several conditions under which an MP who switched parties would not be forced to vacate his or her seat, “namely, if his party is deregistered, if he resigns from his party to become the Speaker, or if he is expelled from his party”.
“I think these are reasonable conditions. Some have used the example of how MPs like Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman who stood his ground for principled reasons against the Sheraton Move and were subsequently sacked from Bersatu as a good reason for not vacating the seats of such MPs.”
He also said some had expressed concerns that recalcitrant MPs may use this clause to get themselves sacked from their own party and join another, but he believed such occurrences would be “relatively rare”.
On concerns that the amendments would not prevent a party from leaving one coalition to join another, Ong said it would be challenging to pass a constitutional amendment which included such a possibility.
“In reality, if the anti-hopping provisions were already in place prior to GE14, Bersatu would not have had the numbers to bring down the Pakatan Harapan government if it was not able to ‘attract’ some Umno MPs to join its ranks post-GE14 and to attract some PKR MPs to join the Sheraton Move,” he said.