Sabah and Sarawak, being fairly large states, deserve special consideration over the number of parliamentary seats allocated to them, Sabah chief minister Hajiji Noor said today, welcoming the federal government’s agreement in principle to increase the number of seats.
He said the announcement by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim earlier today was a positive step, Bernama reported.
Anwar had said the government had agreed in principle to the increase, taking into account the number of voters in the two states.
Hajiji said: “This is certainly what Sabah and Sarawak have been waiting for to get the additional parliamentary seats. Sabah and Sarawak are two fairly large states and should be given special consideration for us to add these parliamentary seats.”
“Thank you to the Prime Minister,” he said in Tuaran after a party event.
Sabah and Sarawak currently have 25 and 31 parliamentary seats respectively.
Hajiji said the additional seats were also needed since the parliamentary constituencies in Sabah were also experiencing an increase in population, such as in Kinabatangan, which is as large as Pahang but only has one parliamentary seat.
In addition, he said the Tuaran parliament constituency also has an area as large as the state of Perlis.
However, Anwar said there was no guarantee the number would amount to one-third of the seats, a level that has been the subject of demands from Sabah and Sarawak leaders.
Hajiji in his statement today also referred to the one-third quota which he claimed to be part of the Malaysia Agreement 1963. (However, the agreement sets out only the number of seats for Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore, then part of the federation; collectively the three states accounted for one-third of the number of seats in the Dewan Rakyat at the time).
