MALAYSIA’S government has shown itself an international laughing stock by its inability to handle media queries about the missing jetliner MH370, according to a Deakin University global politics expert.
Professor Damian Kingsbury, of Deakin’s School of International and Political Studies, said the Malaysian government had been exposed as slow, confused, contradictory, inept and incoherent as it fended off questions about the missing plane.
“After decades of working with a tightly-controlled media and, overwhelmingly, getting a very easy run, the Malaysian government has been asked to answer hard questions by unbowed journalists,” Prof Kingsbury said.
“In its five decades in power, assisted by rigging electoral boundaries, the Malaysian government has rarely been held to account, much less scrutiny.
“It is not used to addressing questions directly or, sometimes, honestly. However in recent years its grip on power has weakened.
“The MH370 crisis has shown how sclerotic the otherwise comfortable Malaysian government has become.”
Prof Kingsbury said the Malaysian had been slow to release details to the public, had refused to share information with the opposition and manufactured accounts of police visiting the pilot’s home before they actually did visit.
It had tried to link opposition leader Anward Ibrahim to missing pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, implying some connection between the plane’s disappearance and trumped-up sodomy charges levelled against Ibrahim.
Prof Kingsbury said that in the vacuum fuelled by the Malaysian government’s “ill-informed ramblings”, rumour and speculation took the place of hard information.
He said the Malaysia media reported everything from the plane bursting into flames mid-flight, crashing in the ocean, being hijacked by the crew or others, landing on a remote airstrip, flying in the shadow of another plane and being sighted over the Maldives.
“Even that doyen of accurate reporting, Rupert Murdoch, has been twittering into the void: ‘World seems transfixed by 777 disappearance. Maybe no crash but stolen, effectively hidden, perhaps in northern Pakistan, like Bin Laden’,” he said.
