KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 6 — Both Jelutong MP RSN Rayer and Arau MP Datuk Seri Shahidan Kassim were today crowned the “most controversial MPs” based on official Parliament Hansard data released by Parliament watchdog MyMP today.
Stressing their findings as being tongue-in-cheek, and unserious, MyMP founder Lau Chak Onn said the titles awarded to both MPs were the analytic result of years of data scrapping through Parliament Hansard dating as far back as 2018, where his team of volunteers set on tabulating every instance where the August House descends into a ruckus and who were the usual instigators.
“The small team at MyMP did this by scraping the Hansards, which document every word said in Parliament, using Python programming language.
“They then searched for the keywords 'parlimen riuh' and 'parlimen ketawa' to identify instances which brought the house down before taking the last two names that occurred before the ruckuses,” he told a press conference at IDEAS Malaysia here.
The results? Rayer won a landslide victory in the July 2018 - October 2022 14th Dewan Rakyat sessions (post-GE14), appearing in over 531 riuh instances; while Shahidan came in second at 391 riuh instances.
Shahidan was later proclaimed victor in the recent December 2022 - June 2023 15th Dewan Rakyat sessions (post-GE15), while Rayer dropped to third place at 44 riuh instances.
Pendang MP Datuk Awang Hashim bagged second place at 55 riuh instances.
Despite the “ruckuses”, Lau said both Shahidan and Rayer were effective and performing MPs based on MyMP data gathered on their attendance and questions asked.
Interestingly Shahidan also claimed both titles for funniest MP post-GE14 and post-GE15 Dewan Rakyat sessions.
When asked if the number of ruckus instances were correlated to the MP's status as an Opposition lawmaker, Lau said it was a possibility as they tend to be “louder” than government backbenchers.
Separately, Lau also announced a key partnership with local thinktank IDEAS, to help develop their PANTAU KUASA project.
Initiated in 2022, the project compares a list of GLC directors with a second list of Malaysian politicians before matching them to pinpoint suspected political appointments.
“We’re really happy to contribute to this project, as what we’ve always wanted is to make political observation engaging. This list comparison fits very well with that end goal, and we believe our data skill sets really come in handy as well,” Lau said.
IDEAS Public Finance Unit manager Alissa Rode said she looked forward to the findings on political appointments made during Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim's government which is slated for launch early next year.
