KOTA KINABALU: Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) welcomes the Opposition Pakatan Harapan's preparedness to work with the Federal Government but says that fundamental political differences between them will not change.

       PBS president Datuk Seri Dr Maximus Ongkili said its party's political stand and the differences with the Opposition remained.

       "Yes, I sat down and shook hands with Opposition MPs from Sabah during the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

       "However, our stand remains that PBS will always be fundamentally different from the Opposition in terms of ideals, political struggle, and multi-ethnic make-up,” said Ongkili, who is Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Sabah and Sarawak Affairs) on Tuesday (Sept 14).

       He said the decision taken by the Pakatan parties to finally agree and support the proposals to achieve political stability and transformation in the country was three weeks delayed as they rejected the first offer by former prime minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin.

       “As PBS president, I was also involved in extending invitations to the Sabah DAP, PKR, and Warisan Members of Parliament to participate in the transformation partnership, but they rejected it,” said Ongkili.

       However, Ongkili said although the Opposition’s decision came with a three weeks delay, it was better late than never.

       The government signed an MoU with Pakatan on Monday (Sept 13), which is a form of bipartisan cooperation that upholds the spirit of the Malaysian Family to strengthen the nation's fight against Covid-19, administrative transformation, parliamentary reforms, judicial independence, Malaysia Agreement 1963 (MA63) and formation of a steering committee.

       Ongkili said issues of automatic registration of Undi18 should be treaded carefully as the party did not want to see foreigners with dubious citizenship automatically included in the electoral rolls.

       "We (PBS) are not in favour of automatic registration until the Sabah electoral roll is cleansed from the infiltration of foreigners using dubious Malaysian identity documents.

       “I welcome the willingness of the Pakatan parties to accept those principles agreed in the MoU, especially matters of Malaysia Agreement 1963, anti-hop law, reduction of the Prime Minister's term to 10 years as well as the lowering of voting age to 18," he said.

       “We look forward to working meaningfully with the Pakatan parties, especially with regard to ongoing MA63 matters, which were not touched at all by the then Pakatan team when they were in government (2018-20)," he claimed.

       On other Sabah issues, Ongkili claimed that Pakatan did not resolve issues of illegal immigrants in the state, documentation of the dubious status of foreigners holding various documents like IMM13, Kad Burung-Burung and Sijil Bancian.