Julius (seated third left), Bobby (seated third right) and Ng (seated second right) with other PBDSB supreme council members at the press conference.
KUCHING: It is of crucial importance that the registration of Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak Baru (PBDSB) be restored and the process expedited so that the party can play its proper positive role especially in the upcoming state election, says its legal adviser Dominique Ng.
He therefore appealed to the Minister of Home Affairs Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yasin to make his decision under Section 18 of the Societies Act to restore the registration of PBDSB as soon as possible.
“This is not a situation where the party had acted against the national security or have created a lot of havoc or had done a lot of mischievous actions in the community to deserve the cancellation of its registration,” he told a press conference called by PBDSB here yesterday.
PBDSB had already made an appeal to the minister.
And since the party’s top leadership had actually communicated with the ministry and the Registrar which means its restoration could only be a matter of time, Ng urged the public not to be so quick as to sound the death knell of PBDSB.
Ng believed that the cancellation of PBDSB’s registration was not a situation where PBDSB had wilfully failed to contravene any particular requirement of the Societies Act.
“So it is not a wilful act. So in this case, I don’t think their cancellation, which was done under the Section 13, needed to be a permanent one,” he said.
He argued that PBDSB has definitely done its work except for certain legal requirements which are not that crucial.
“This is what we called administrative work, that is you have to file the annual returns. To my knowledge, Cobbold John was definitely very active.
“What happened, why the annual reports were not submitted for a couple of years, we are still investigating. But certainly, it is not intentional. In fact, PBDSB did contest in the last election and the Watikah that was signed by Cobbold was valid. So they were very active,” he said.
Ng saw PBDSB as performing a very crucial role in Sarawak’s political environment because it carries the aspirations of many determined Sarawakians, especially the Dayaks, who felt that they have been deprived of what ought to belong to them.
“I, for one, have fought and will continue to fight many cases of native customary rights (NCR) lands belonging to the Dayak communities, whose lands were taken, given away to major corporations without any due recognition of their prior rights to the lands.
“This continues to be a very important political issue which, I believe, PBDSB plays a crucial and central role in advocating and defending their rights.”
PBDSB, he argued further, did not do anything that would be destructive to the harmony within the community the way that Malayan race and religious-based parties are doing.
Therefore, he said the parallel drawn by some political commentators that PBDSB is a racial-based party must be qualified because it is totally different from Umno and PAS which continue to pursue very narrow race-based and religion-based policies.