AUG 22 — I imagine an over-qualified driver bringing a young girl to a hospital before stopping at a mortuary to offload five body bags.

This is what comes to me as I ponder about three events, seemingly unrelated but are central to how justice is dished out in Malaysia, and perhaps a window to how Malaysians perceive justice.

They being: the mandatory pregnancy tests for hundreds of thousands of National Service trainees, Cabinet backing down from blacklisting university loan (PTPTN) defaulters and police gunning down five men in a pre-dawn Penang apartment raid.

Has it ever rung more true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions?

In an attempt to deal with stillborn babies in filthy camp latrines, upset young voters and rising gangland style executions those in power went for the convenient, populist and expedient respectively, and in doing so increased the ineffectuality of their administration.

Here’s some advice: doing the right thing never is easy, quick or popular, and it is never right to undermine the rights of minorities indefinitely to win the argument of the day.

She’s leaving home

A National Service trainee delivered her child inside a camp last June and now they’ve decided to impose pregnancy tests on all females called up, many of them 17 years old. They’ve backed the decision with a statistic, 94 per cent of 4,500 respondents made up of parents and trainees in 2011 agreed with this new measure, and the support of the Ministry for Women and Family.

I’m not sure about how many per cent of the respondents were trainees as opposed to parents or even more so the ratio of males to females, but I doubt most young women want to be forced to take a pregnancy test. They’d say so if they were allowed to without duress or a camp commandant looking over while they fill surveys in an ever-so moralising Malaysia.

Finding out if someone is carrying a child or not is as invasive as it gets, which is why it must always remain the prerogative of women, no matter how old or young they are.

I sense that my detractors are going to offer the “they have nothing to fear if they have been chaste young girls” and only a few would have transgressed, but that is where the simplicity of the encroachment renders it most frightening.

There have been college students found aborting under staircases so shall we have mandatory pregnancy tests at the start of each semester? And how far away are we from virginity tests for all unmarried females biannually? Or should we just install CCTVs in college dorms and homes of single women so that we can help them prevent bad outcomes?

Back to the camps, the cynic in me asks which company has won the tender to supply test kits to all the camps at an inflated price.

These camps are places to prepare our young for life, and knowing their rights and having those rights protected are as important or perhaps even more than any national unity celebration exercise.

The failure of support structures for young persons in this country is not an excuse to haphazardly remove bodily autonomy from a person. The harm of this new measure is manifold and fortunately for the administrators these young girls have been trained from young not to assert their rights, or even know them.

How does an 18-year-old deal with arriving at camp with friends and gets unceremoniously and vitally and publicly expelled from National Service the day after?

And what good will our system offer all these young girls once they have been expelled from this relative oasis of good?

Loan me your votes

The Cabinet’s decision was unsurprising, there were too many votes to be lost if graduates were refused new credit by financial institutions.

The no-nonsense crowd expectedly objected, insisting that when you take a loan, then you have to repay the loan. To them it is a categorical imperative which requires no defending for it is self-evident.

On the face of it yes, but the matter must be laid out on the canvas with other issues and facts populating the broader Malaysian reality.

Malaysia is a rich country. Of course the rebuttal remains that wealth does not compromise principle, and I’ll add that it is principle that ensures wealth maintained.

Malaysia is a rich country where so much of its riches are squandered in the open with no fuss or examination, and those responsible not likely to see the inside of a jail cell.

That is the reality the young see as they grow up in Malaysia, and attend university. New buildings and facilities are constructed inside campuses even when there is no need, while contracts are dished out quicker and more efficiently than education.

At the same time, monies and futures are secured through the politicians the impressionable swear allegiance to.

This is the Malaysia they see, and as a result of the system all of us have condoned, why is it odd that they want a free ride too?

If everyone is lining up at this proverbial monster Malaysia ATM, why not them too?

Obviously it is a moral free-fall, but it is one which all of us are part of and if it were to be confronted then I’ll suggest starting at the neck, the fattest cats in the room and the entitlements they wear like a fur scarf.

Debt discipline must strike at all levels of Malaysian life. I’m not for populist measures which ignore process, but to only zero in on the easy target that is just state-sanctioned hypocrisy.

The song goes bang, bang, bang

Dead men are no menace. Yes, and poker chips come in an assortments of colours.

The police shot dead five men in a Penang flat and my good friend says that that they should do the same in KL. I am stumped. When the urbane believe shooting people is a noble cleansing tradition, then it’s time all of us begin to worry.

Approaching crime with an “us-against-them” attitude is a recipe for cruelty and harsh mistakes. A frightened England condoned bad laws to fight the bad men terrorising its cities in the 1970s, but it was not the bayonet that eventually brought the relative peace experienced today. Which is why the British are trying hard today not to treat their Muslim population badly despite the fear of Muslim-derived violence. They learnt their Irish lesson.

Intelligence, purpose and fairness are the key components of successful agencies seeking to ensure internal security. Racial profiling, shoot before talking and more guns on the streets appear to be expedient but they will result in hate and resentment which are the fuels of criminal behaviour.

Justice is a cross to bear

It is not alarming that while most want to live in just societies, few want to contribute to the generation of a just society.

While it is tempting to think that making things right is only a medical test, financial default and trigger pull away, it is a dangerous method to ensuring justice.

These developments don’t return an uncertain public’s confidence to those governing, if anything they underline to the thinking that a group of scared people are running this country presently.

Principle, conviction and fairness have taken the last train from Putra station and going places even Komuter KL can’t spell.

Unless those in charge start to lay themselves down for the people and risk their political capital for things beyond votes or power, nothing real will emerge and as in this situation only frightened girls, empty bank vaults and full crematoriums will be realised.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.