There are a few imputations that I want to raise in relation to the article:
Imputation no 1:
[T]he Malaysian Constitution has been amended more than 40 times since Malaya obtained independence on Aug 31, 1957, that is, 53 years ago.
That, by itself, is not wrong. The Malaysian constitution has been more than 40 times since 1957. I count no less than 600 amending acts in the footnotes of the Malaysian Federal Constitution.
Imputation no 2:
[H]ow do you know whether your elected representatives have upheld the integrity of the supreme law of the land or amended it for political expediency?
If one actually took the time to read the annotated version of the Malaysian Constitution, one would realise that a lot of it was done between 1963 and 1965. The fact that Malaysia was formed in 1963 and Singapore was ejected in 1965 is no accident.
While I have not done a critical study, from my gaze I guess that around 25% of those amendments were to lay the foundations for the establishment of Malaysia. For starters, the original title of the constitution was "The Federal Constitution of Malaya". That needed to be changed.
Singapore had significant provisions in the original 1957 constitution. When Singapore was ejected out, the Constitution of Malaysia (Singapore Amendment) Act, act 53 of 1965 removed a lot of provisions. All in all, I would say that almost half of the amendments were done before 1970, and in a time of great change.
The real issue is not how many times the constitution has been amended, but what has been changed. Sadly I am no expert on Constitutional Law, so it is hard to qualify how much of those changes were for good and for bad. For instance, the 1963 constitution made reference to "Borneo States" in their Malaysia provisions. In 1971-1972 much of that was amended to read as "Sabah and Sarawak". Is that necessarily a bad thing?
On the flip side, it has to be noted that the number of amending acts is not equal to the number of amendments done. Unlike the "Washington system", in the Westminster parliamentary system, a amending act can change multiple sections of the constitution. Thus, the real number of amendments can actually be higher than 600.
Short of having access to every one and single of the 600+ amending act, it is impossible to know qualitatively how much the constitution has been changed, much less being able to come to a conclusion that the amendments were "good" or "bad".
I personally support the MyConstitution project. Exactly how much of an impact it can have on the voting masses in making a informed decision at the ballot box through, is another question.
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