COMMENT | This week there is expected to be a flurry of activity around the Parliament building. The brazen acts of this government in the past month are mobilising and politicising the rakyat section by section.

Today, students are gathering (below) to protest the silencing of Asheeq Ali, UKM student activist and #TangkapMO1 organiser.

They will call out the UKM administration for doing the dirty work of Prime Minister and Korruptor-in-Chief, Najib Abdul Razak.

They will demand directly the abolition of Auku, a creation of past prime ministers Hussein Onn and Mahathir Mohamad, which has been used for over 40 years to crack down on student activism.

Tomorrow, Bersih will gather outside Parliament to protest the sham redelineation report by the EC, which, just like everything else the EC seems to do, has been drafted in secret and will be rammed through the Dewan Rakyat as quickly as the government can manage.

It's late notice, but we are happy that Bersih has finally decided to call an action before the election and bring people out onto the streets.

The journalists are next

But this article is for the journalists and editors out there. You who the rakyat have depended on all their lives to find out what's going on.

You who range from downtrodden tabloid-writing drones to the most daring undercover reporters.

You who rush through the traffic and the airports to catch our elusive politicians wherever they run, pick their brains and smile at their nonsensical answers.

Your profession is under attack.

All of us are quite aware of the Anti-Fake News Bill that was tabled for its first reading yesterday. It is designed explicitly to outlaw the kinds of exposes the Najib administration has struggled with from its first days.

It is designed to bankrupt and neutralise individuals, news outlets and even sharers for questioning the government's narrative. There is plenty of coverage of these details.

The National Union of Journalists has released a statement against this Bill, noting that orders made under this bill cannot be challenged in court.

The terms of criminalisation are vague and the punishments are far more severe than even existing censorship laws like the Communications and Multimedia Act.

This flurry of activity in Parliament is not a coincidence. There are mere weeks left before Parliament is dissolved, days if some rumours are to be believed.

We must kill the bill now, while we have the chance. To do that, we must drop all pretence that this can be a fair fight.

Original fake news

Throughout history, the first and greatest perpetrators of fake news have been governments and the corporations that support them.

How many times has government lied through its teeth about the scandals and corruption it has been involved in (and then forced the news outlets it owns to report those lies)?

How many times has the corporate press ignored important issues like Orang Asli rights and urban poverty in favour of pushing sensationalised celebrity rumours in our faces?

Journalists and ordinary people alike suffer under this media environment. Never, nowhere and under no circumstances has a media-control law ever succeeded in reducing the level of misinformation the public is exposed to.

It will only allow those in power to force their version of the truth down people's throats.

This bill is the latest in a long line of laws whose purpose is nothing short of the dismantling of independent news organisations and the systematic silencing and demoralising of the people of Malaysia.

The government wants people who suspect that something is wrong with life in Malaysia to think they are helpless and alone.

Even now our friends down in Singapore are being subjected to the same ridiculous discussion, which the PAP has named in classic bureaucrat style, "deliberate online falsehoods".

Like us, they have hauled in the likes of Facebook and Google to try and persuade them to help police online space. Some journalists are having none of it, and all power to them.

We speak from personal experience in Australia that only an informed and the politically active public can sniff out truth from lies.

But we know the government has no interest in giving the rakyat a shred of political education aside from one of the first instances of fake news we are served in our lives - the Sejarah textbook.

Zero-compromise on a free press

The time for neutrality is over. When the state, especially a state as corrupt and hostile to the opposition as ours, claims to be the sole arbiter of what is real and what is fake, there is no time for hesitation.

The integrity of your profession is not negotiable. You didn't go through a journalism degree for this.

We call on the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), journalists of all newspapers, opposition political parties especially Pakatan Harapan and all people who support the work of journalism, to mobilise and kill this bill.

Harapan, in particular, has the opportunity to make this an election issue in the seats of all the ministers involved in pushing this bill.

We support journalists in using whatever means are at their disposal, including open agitation through their media outlets, industrial disruption of mainstream news delivery including newspaper printing and TV broadcasts, and public protest, to organise against the bill.

We especially encourage efforts to agitate workers in mainstream media outlets against this bill which is an insult to their intelligence and professional skill.

Good journalists have stood up for the people through thick and thin. Now we the people must stand up for our journalists. Say the word, call the rally and we will join you.

Finally, we call on the rakyat, opposition parties, NGOs and activist groups to link up and mobilise for each other's causes.

In this critical time approaching the election, we must make opposition to the government's agenda loud and visible, penetrating into every corner of Malaysian society.

There should be no safe haven for the government from the anger of the people. We support the actions called by the UKM students and by Bersih, and we urge Malaysians to join them and get involved.

JASON WONG is president, Malaysian Progressives in Australia (MPOZ), which is a movement of young Malaysians in Australia who strive for open dialogue of political reform in Malaysia.

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