The state local government and housing minister was quoted by the Borneo Post yesterday as saying that the former members were welcome to come back to help the party achieve its target of winning seven parliamentary seats.
He said they could contribute towards strengthening and uniting the party, together with all communities that had been supporting the Barisan Nasional (BN).
“Sarawak (BN) needs to win the maximum 31 seats it has in Parliament to have better negotiating powers to get its rights back that it lost in the past. We need to protect Sarawak’s interest,” he said.
Sim also said he was optimistic that SUPP would win the maximum seven seats allocated to it under the BN in the upcoming 14th general election (GE14).
He was confident the party would perform much better than it had done in the last general election, in May 2013, when it won only one of the seven parliamentary seats it had contested.
The sole seat, Serian, was won by the party’s deputy president Richard Riot, who is now federal human resources minister.
Sim said winning the allocated seats would help to strengthen Sarawak’s effort in negotiating for more of the state’s rights from Putrajaya.
He added that SUPP had finalised the list of its candidate for GE14.
In the last state assembly election, held in April 2016, the party won seven of the 13 seats it contested on behalf of the BN.
Meanwhile, former SUPP president Dr George Chan Hong Nam, who led the party from 1997 to 2011, said he supported Sim’s effort to unite all Chinese in Sarawak so that they would have a strong voice to further negotiate on the Malaysia Agreement 1963 (MA63).
“If I am asked, I am willing to take the role to mediate between the various factions in the party and the opposition. So that the Chinese can be united in politics,” he was quoted as saying by The Borneo Post.
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