LETTER | We welcome the coming Parliament session from July 26 to Aug 2 and thank His Majesty the Yang di-Pertuan Agong for calling for Parliament to meet and Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin for fixing the dates for this parliamentary special session.

We believe this special session of Parliament will be essential to ensure good governance, integrity, transparency and accountability.

We call on MPs on both sides of the House to prioritise the people and the nation and to put aside political divides and rivalry to ensure we can all combine efforts and resources to win the war against the invisible enemy we are fighting- the Coronavirus. MPs should be true wakil rakyat and not just wakil parti prioritising the nation and people above party interests.

We need more than ever a bipartisan approach to save lives and livelihood. In this regard, we propose Parliament should establish a new All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on National Recovery so that MPs from both sides can be involved in efforts to overcome the pandemic and save lives and livelihoods. 

This can be similar to the successful APPG on the Sustainable Development Goals which has members from both the government and opposition parties working together.

We hope MPs will focus on the 3Rs in the upcoming special session of Parliament - Recovery, Reconciliation, Rebuilding.

We also wish to call for the establishment of a new National Consultative Council on National Recovery to be set up with representatives from the government, opposition parties, civil society organisations, business and industry associations and think tanks and academics to focus on how we can build back better for the nation.

We note the recent Pemulih stimulus package and the scaling up of the National Immunisation Programme which has now reached 250,000 doses per day.

We hope the government will also take into account views and suggestions from the opposition, the private sector, NGOs and think tanks so we can all be united on this singular objective of winning the war against Coronavirus and resetting the nation onto the path of sustained recovery, peace and unity.

The writers are the president and adviser, respectively, of the KSI Strategic Institute for Asia Pacific.

The views expressed here are those of the authors/contributors and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.