Bersih chief Thomas Fann said this could be done either through new legislation such as a Constituency Development Funding Act or as part of the proposed Parliamentary Services Act.

Through such legislation, the allocation of funds for MPs would be dispensed through Parliament, not the Prime Minister’s Office, he said.

“The funds cannot be given out at the whim and fancy of the prime minister of the day,” said Fann at the launch of Bersih’s 2021 annual report.

Equal funding for all MPs is among the conditions of the government’s memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Pakatan Harapan, signed in Sept 2021.

The Parliamentary Services Act was also one of the points agreed upon in the MoU, but a draft bill has yet to be seen.

Fann also said the Election Commission (EC) should modernise its manual methods of processing postal voter applications to capitalise on the potential votes of an estimated two million Malaysians residing overseas.

With enough publicity carried out by the EC, civil society and the media, he said there was the possibility of several hundred thousand Malaysians applying to be postal voters.

“If they (EC) maintain the current manual methods, they can only handle up to 10,000 applications, which would render this right given to overseas voters totally meaningless,” he said.