Actually I'm not at all sure that 75-year-old Sir Norman Frank Sisson, the Australian former goldminer who was granted Malaysian permanent residency as he lay comatose on his deathbed last week in Ipoh, ever got to enjoy the joke. But I certainly hope so, because he sounds to have been a friendly, down-to-earth bloke who loved to see the funny side of things.

Sir Norman, who despite his elevated title was apparently content to be known simply as "Norm," was described to the press by one of his friends, a Datin Dorothy Khoo, as a good man who lived a simple life, wore shorts, drove an old car and "had this funny way of laughing that made others laugh as well."

So it seems a fair bet to me that he would have got quite a chuckle out of the fact that it took news of his two-month terminal coma to awaken the Immigration Department out of the eight-year coma it had fallen into while "considering" his application for permanent residency.

We'll never know for sure whether he actually got the last laugh, however, as while the sponsor of his residency application, his good friend and snooker buddy of 15 years, Rohaya Ariffin, reportedly told him many times that his Malaysian PR had been granted and "he opened his eyes one day," she couldn't be certain she got the message through to him.

Cabinet's attention

The idiocy of the situation clearly got through to the Immigration Department, however, as Home Affairs Minister Mohd Radzi Sheikh Ahmad announced that Sir Norman's case had caught the attention of the cabinet. And two days earlier, as if by coincidence, Immigration DG Raja Azahar Raja Abdul Manap announced the exciting news that his department is embarking on an IT campaign as "part of the department's efforts to improve our delivery system to better serve the public."

It's certainly high time the Immigration Department did something to achieve, if not an improvement in its delivery system, at least some positive PR following endless complaints about the time it's been taking to process applications for permanent residency.

The Star , ever ready to pursue its policy of reporting the spin instead of the story, implied that at least Frank Sisson passed away happy after his eight-year wait, in a feel-good piece headed "Aussie dies knowing he had been made a PR." In fact, as Sir Frank himself would no doubt be amused to observe if he was still with us, he did even better than he bargained for, becoming not just a PR but an ER: an eternal resident, at least in residual form, as his ashes are destined to reside in perpetuity at Ipoh's Kek Lok Si Crematorium.

He'd also, I suspect, be delighted that his case may have paved the way for faster and more efficient service for the numerous other foreigners in Malaysia, many of them spouses of Malaysian citizens, who've been dying to achieve approval of their permanent residency applications for far, far longer than he was. Many of them may not enjoy his advantage of having been awarded a knighthood, and some of these undesirables may well share what the Immigration Department may have deemed Sir Frank's drawbacks as a permanent resident, like wearing shorts, driving an old car or embracing Buddhism.

Foreigner-unfriendly country

But all that endless waiting's in the past now, it seems, as, or so the Immigration DG claims, from as early as 2007 Department of Immigration officers will "at the click of a mouse" be able to determine the whereabouts and status of applications for PR, and "hopefully, with this in place, the processing time can be shortened to maybe a year."

Wow. Sure sounds impressive, doesn't it? Personally I'll believe this amazing new initiative when I see its results. Having recently had to make four expeditions to the wilds of Putra Jaya just to renew a simple one-year work permit under the Spouse Program, and having observed on each and every visit that the indicator that shows the ticket number and goes 'ding' to signal 'next' still continues, as always, to point to the wrong counter numbers, I'm a tad dubious about the Immigration Department's prospects of success in its belated venture into the weird wired world of IT.

But whatever the outcome of the department's efforts to reinvent itself, it won't affect me personally. I have no intention whatever of applying to spend the rest of my life in Malaysia or any other foreigner-unfriendly country. And as much as I'd prefer to die laughing than any other way, and as I hope for his sake Frank Sisson did at the thought of his post-mortem permanent residency, I find it hard to see the funny side of public institutions whose lethargy, inefficiency and even, in some cases, outright dishonesty, make them a joke at the expense of the people they're supposed to serve.