In todays episode of things that didn’t age well..

Yesterday’s Dewan Rakyat sitting was eventful to say the least. Malaysian prime minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin’s motion to replace the the speaker of the house was passed by the thinnest of margins, making Malaysia only the second country in the world to replace a sitting Parliamentary Speaker who’s not incapacitated or dead.

While opposition MPs were not happy about the move, they were completely bamboozled when Parliament reconvened after lunch to find that Datuk Azhar Azizan Harun, affectionately known as Art Harun, had been announced as the new Parliamentary Speaker.

At this point, the Parliamentary Sitting had become more of a farce than anything, with opposition MPs vehemently rejecting the legality of his appointment for about 17 straight minutes.

In spite of all the noise made, Harun’s appointment is in fact legal and the whole situation turned out to be a case of Perikatan Nasional simply outsmarting its opponents, rather than the party breaching any laws.

Needless to say, day one was a baptism of fire for Harun, who prior to this had cultivated a fine reputation as a respected figure in Malaysia.

His inability to control the Dewan Rakyat on his first day, coupled with his utter failure to call out Baling MP Datuk Seri Abdul Azeez Abdul Rahim for his racist and sexist comments made headlines in the aftermath of the sitting, and many were left with a bad taste in their mouths.

As you’d expect in 2020, the internet did it’s thing and netizens have unearthed a rather interesting video published back in 2018 where Harun blasts former Dewan Rakyat Speaker, Pandikar Amin Mulia, for the exact same things that he himself let fly in Parliament just yesterday.

Harun used to have his own video podcast published under The Malaysian Insight YouTube channel titled “Art of the Matter”. His show touches mainly on political issues and one of the episodes, titled “Dewan Rakyat Speaker”, has quite simply NOT aged well at all.

In the video, published just after Pakatan Harapan had won GE14, Harun explains the selection of the Speaker of the Dewan Rakyat and his role. Towards the end of the video, he elaborates on instances where the Speaker abuses his power or fails to properly do his job and ironically ends up describing himself on his first day on the job yesterday.

On adjourning Parliament early:

“The last Speakers allowed the government and PAS to talk in favour of the bill and then he adjourned the proceeding without allowing the opposition to reply, that is also an abuse.”

On chasing members of Parliament out of the house:

“The Speaker was also known to sack members of Parliament or chase them out of Parliament for some reason or another.. thats also another abuse.”

On the past Speaker’s failure to control unruly behaviour & crackdown on sexist remarks:

“The other failure that we saw was the Speaker’s utter failure to control unruly behaviour, to warn a certain member of Parliament belonging to a certain party (we know who they are) from being unruly, from being rude, from using crude languages and even from using sexist remarks.. We are in 2018, and there we were having members of Parliament who are actually ministers using sexist remarks on female members of Parliament and the speaker just let it go.”

On the qualities needed to be Dewan Rakyat Speaker:

“That is why I think the office of Speaker must be filled by a person of integrity, who is fiercely independent and who knows the procedure of the Parliament like the back of his hand. He must be able to control all members of parliament properly so that we could have a discussion and a very civil but robust debate of matters of public importance.”

It only took two years for Art Harun to go from the art of the matter to the art of hypocrisy. That being said though, perhaps he was overwhelmed by all the grown adults screaming at each others faces. Harun was a respected figure in this country for a reason and to his credit, has started day two of the Parliamentary sitting by ordering Datuk Seri Abdul Azeez Abdul Rahim to apologise and retract his offensive statements.

What do you guys make of this? Let us know in the comments.