PETALING JAYA – Harnessing data to make Parliament monitoring more fun and attractive to the masses, non-governmental organisation MYMP today shone the spotlight on the Dewan Rakyat’s funniest and most controversial members.
Founder Lau Chak Onn in a press conference said MYMP utilised the Hansard to scrape for data in a bid to make the people interested in reading the said transcripts of parliamentary debates.
The Hansard is important, according to him, as it is a way for the people to keep tabs on what their elected representatives have been up to in Parliament.
Previously, MYMP monitored the attendance of MPs, which became a hit among the public.
According to Lau, their website hit a million views at the height of the 15th general election after they released the attendance data.
In the press conference, Lau said they decided to look for the most “lively” MPs by using two keywords: riuh (chaos) and ketawa (laughter).
He explained that they found many instances in the Hansard where the transcriber had keyed in “Dewan riuh”.
This led to them devising a method to see which MP most frequently made a ruckus in the lower House.
For the 14th Parliament from July 2018 to October 2022, Jelutong’s R.S.N. Rayer was crowned the most controversial MP, based on MYMP’s data.
The method they employed was to look at the two names that appeared in Hansard before the phrase “Dewan riuh”.
Rayer came in first, as his name appeared 521 times before it was followed by “dewan riuh”.
DAP chairman Lim Guan Eng is fourth on the controversial list, with his name appearing 289 times before “Dewan riuh”.
The same method was applied to look for the funniest MP, where the keywords used were “Dewan ketawa” and “ketawa”, after which Arau MP Datuk Seri Shahidan Kassim emerged the winner for the same period.
For the 15th Parliament from December 2022 to June this year, Shahidan bagged both “most controversial” and “funniest” titles.
Lau remarked that although these names may be attention-grabbing for such reasons, other data showed that they were also effective as MPs.
From July 2021 to now, PAS’ Shahidan has recorded an attendance of 99 out of 103 parliamentary sessions. He has also put forth 57 questions. This gained him a work ethic score of 5.8, said MYMP.
As for Rayer, the DAP MP has attended 97 out of 103 sessions and is given a work ethic score of 5.7. – The Vibes, September 6, 2023
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