There is no point in tabling the Urban Renewal Bill (URA) for its second reading in Parliament as the core issue goes beyond merely raising the consent threshold to 80%, says MCA president Datuk Seri Dr Wee Ka Siong.
Speaking to reporters after receiving a memorandum from concerned stakeholders on Wednesday (Oct 1), Dr Wee said there were deeper concerns about the lack of transparency in the development process, protection of constitutional rights, and adequate compensation for affected homeowners.
Dr Wee, who is a member of the Parliamentary Special Select Committee (PSSC) on Infrastructure, Transport and Communications, said he would raise these concerns with the committee.
00:00I'm very grateful today to receive the memorandum from 16 CESO's or the
00:16signatories for this joint statement and basically after the town hall
00:23discussion and the statement was issued immediately after that meeting and today
00:30we have 16 organizations who signed for the memorandum I mean to state our
00:38position which is against the present form of URAP so it is important for us to
00:46to mention here that come 6th of October will be the session new session the
00:55third session of the Parliament 650 so this will be the last session the budget
01:03session so in order to present the views as well as the opinions and the what you
01:12call as a result of the consultation with the stakeholders and today I have
01:17received this memorandum and which basically described the position and the
01:24opinions of every stakeholder so today I'm glad to see that there are many
01:30influential organizations like national house by extension we have Kuala Lumpur
01:39Residence Action for Sustainable Development Association KLRA plus ST and we have this
01:46two professional body as Malaysia Institute of Property and Facilities
01:52Managers MPFM Royal Institution of Surveillance Malaysia Rism Malaysia Urban Design Association
02:00Pereka Bandar G25 and friends of Dukit Kiara we have PJ Sejahtera Persatuan Petaling Jaya Lestari
02:13we have Alliance of River Tree and Klima Association Malaysia PJ Sejahtera among others right we have of course MCA and
02:27an insult they are also signatory to this so this is as a result of the discussion since 25th of March we started the first town hall meeting and today I'm glad to see that we come up with the consensus and my duty is to present this to the PSC tomorrow and tomorrow parliamentary select committee to convene this meeting and of course we bring this
02:56memorandum and to present to the committee as well and followed by other town hall meeting to be held in the next couple of days and we hope that you know the government will listen to the grievances as well as the opinions by the various organizations
03:17first of all I think we have already listened enough voices from the people that many of them are still skeptical and they don't feel comfortable comfortable at all to have the present form of URA bill
03:41so first as I mentioned in this many of them have already mentioned in various forms in terms of transparency the constitutional rights and the participation by the
03:58the resistance association and we talk about this what they call in terms of compensation not clearly stated and a lot of things has not been ironed out so therefore I do not think we are ready for the new URA and better we should revisit to have such URA bill or not because we have existing laws
04:25whether you can improve upon or just make some amendments to I think that was the consensus that we have I mean over this few months right so secondly we are not like Singapore Singapore basically for public housing it was built by HDB
04:49HDB a state body is stopped by developers so we have to make it very clear when you are making a comparison it must be comparison between apple to apple
05:01it should not be totally different characteristics okay and besides we have other issue as well as I mentioned in Malaysia we have so many laws
05:17strata title act and national length code and we have all the circumstances listed down what should we do and the government have to go through the stringent rules and regulation in order to achieve that right so with the presentation
05:37I think that we have all the same
05:44by the KPPKT that they are going to going ahead with this amendment and by just changing the 75% to 80% I think the crux of the issue is not about 75% changing to 80% more than that so I think it has been elaborated in this memorandum
05:59so I hope that the civil society and even political parties regardless of which party you are from whether you are living in the rural area or the urban area so I think you should view this as a very serious bill so that you know in future we want to make sure that every bill
06:27and those by the parliament is to the maximum benefits of the people
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