PETALING JAYA, Aug 9 — Years serving as the assemblyman for Bandar Utama has given DAP’s Jamaliah Jamaluddin an insight into how she can bring up heavier topics in conversations with female residents in her constituency.
Speaking to Malay Mail, she said oftentimes there were too few participants interested in workshops dealing with issues such as sexual harassment. So she changed her tactics, finding success in “sneaking” them into more relaxing activities such as baking cakes.
“So to spread awareness our strategy was sort of like to use the more relaxing events, for example, cake baking. While they’re waiting for the cake to bake, we would have [speakers] come in and brief [the participants] about certain issues.
“We are trying to empower women that way,” she said in a recent interview.
Afterwards, she said the information and statistics from such workshops would be brought back to the Selangor state government to inform policies.
Jamaliah said empowering women is one of the issues that she holds dear, another being youth development.
The Selangor state government was the only one, or at least one of a few states, which has programmes for women and youth under Penggerak Belia Selangor (PeBS) and Pusat Wanita Berdaya (PWB), she said.
In her experience, she said that youths often lack soft skills that were not taught in secondary schools such as financial literacy, how to write a job resume and handle job interviews, as well as civic knowledge.
Because of that, she tries to fill in the gap with workshops for young Malaysians.
“The reason why we do it is to observe and monitor how our youths understand current issues and governance, financial planning, and so on,” she said.
This leads to further engagement with executive state committee members to come up with more ideas for workshops and programmes, she said, citing career fairs held by the state government as an example.
Besides that, another community that she and her team carefully monitor is that of senior citizens — especially as around 40 per cent of Bandar Utama residents are aged 50 and above, with retirees making a significant chunk of locals.
“What we are trying to do with our experience and our engagement with senior citizens or retirees here is that we’ve figured that we need institutionalised aged care at one point or better policies for our senior citizens,” she said.
While there are many senior citizen associations in her constituency that run a lot of programmes and events for these older folks, she said however, what they often lacked were spaces and facilities to hold their activities as community spaces were few and far between and often had to be shared.
“After retirement, it doesn’t mean that’s it [for life],” she said, adding that older people still need to look after their mental health.
Jamaliah won the Bandar Utama seat in 2018 with a majority of 38,651 votes.
This time, she will be facing Muda’s Abe Lim Hooi Sean as well as Gerakan’s Nur Aliff Mohd Tafid, who are both first-time candidates.
Selangor will be headed to the polls this Saturday along with Penang, Negeri Sembilan, Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu.
The six states decided against holding the state elections at the same time as GE15, citing concerns related to the annual flood season.
