MASJID PUTRA | Islamic laws and customs as well as other native laws and customs in Sabah and Sarawak are vested with the state governments.
The new balance of federal-state relations has allowed the BN-led states of Sabah and Sarawak to press for decentralisation of decisionmaking, increased development allocations, and a greater say in determining local issues.
Chief Minister called for oil royalties to the state to be increased to 50 per cent. There have been renewed calls to increase oil royalties to Sabah after the March 2008 election, as MPs from Sabah and Sarawak accounted for 54 of the 126 BN MPs after the election, and BN could not form the ruling coalition without the Sabah and Sarawak MPs. Sabah and Sarawak BN MPs continue to form the majority in the ruling coalition after the May 2013 general election. Recognising their new importance in the post-2008 election scenario, the Sabah and Sarawak BN have pressed their demands.
The episodes highlighted above demonstrate that federal-state relations in Malaysia is still evolving. The new balance of federal-state relations has allowed the BN-led states of Sabah and Sarawak to press for decentralisation of decision-making, increased development allocations, and a greater say in determining local issues. Overall, assigning more revenue to state governments would be appropriate for meaningful decentralisation of a federation.
References HOLZHAUSEN, W.( 1974) Federal Finance in Malaysia( Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press).
JOMO KWAME SUNDARAN AND WEE CHONG HUI.( 2014) Malaysia @ 50: Economic Development, Distribution, Disparities( Kuala Lumpur: SIRD) in the states that are controlled by the opposition, development funds are currently channelled through the State Development Offices, which are answerable to the Implementation Coordination Unit of the Prime Minister’ s Department. The result is a very uneven distribution of revenue and therein financial resources between the federal and state governments.
The federal bias in the constitutional design, and the domination of a single political party at the centre ostensibly means that a centralised federation in Malaysia is inevitable. This has often led to an acrimonious relationship between federal and state governments especially when the state government is controlled by a different party. There have been, for example, several disputes over petroleum royalties over the years.
Most Malaysian oil is offshore of Terengganu, while most gas is off the shores of Sabah and Sarawak. In the 1990 election campaign, the Sabah
LOH KOK WAH, F.( 2010) Restructuring Federal-State Relations in Malaysia: From Centralization to Co-operative Federalism?, The Round Table, 99:407, 131-140.
LEIGH, MICHAEL BECHETT.( 1998) The Rising Moon: The Political Change in Sarawak( Sydney: University of Sydney Press)
MOHD SALLEH BIN ABBAS( 1978) Federalism in Malaysia: Changes in the first twenty years, in M. Suffian, H. P. Lee and F. A. Trindade( Eds.) The Constitution of Malaysia: Its Development 1957-1977( Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press), pp. 163-191.
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