PKR de facto leader Anwar Ibrahim took his message of renewal and change to a three-stop swing yesterday through Malacca, a state that is thus far been cool to his agenda of political reform.

However, the results of Anwar’s visit has been encouraging to party activists, who are intent on making inroads in what is regarded as a Barisan Nasional bastion.

In the 2004 general elections, BN won all six parliamentary seats and 26 out of 28 state seats in Malacca.

Except at his last stop in Pantai Kundor in the parliamentary constituency of Tangga Batu where the crowd was overwhelmingly Malay, Anwar drew mixed-race crowds in the industrial area at Cheng, also in the same constituency, and in Paya Mengkuang, located in the adjoining ward of Masjid Tanah.

At all three stops his theme was the same: the paradigm of national development forged by the BN government over nearly four decades of rule has come badly unstuck through waste, corruption, and weak and exploitative leadership.

“It is time for change, not small change, but governmental and systemic change,” he said in a refrain that drew the loudest rounds of applause of his half-day visit.

“A PKR government would be better merely by avoiding their waste and mismanagement,” he said at Pantai Kundor.

It was difficult to estimate the size of the crowd because many of his listeners were standing in the unlighted vicinity of the PAS headquarters where the ceramah was held.

Organisers said this was because the Umno supporters among the crowd were not only huddling under umbrellas in the dark as a steady drizzle fell but also wanted to be discreet about their presence.

An eleventh hour switch of venue from Sg Udang, which is close to the Terendak Army Camp, to Pantai Kundor - necessitated by police pressure - did little to discourage army personnel, civil servants, petty traders and manual workers from attending the ceramah.

The crowd, initially polite in applauding the earlier speakers, was keyed up by the next-to-last speaker for the night, Omar Jaafar, a PKR supreme council member, who reminded the crowd that Anwar has had throughout his career a transformative effect on the organisations he led.

“When we were in Universiti Malaya in the late 60s and early 70s, he turned the Bahasa Melayu Society he led into a body that had a bigger impact on the undergraduates than the umbrella body, Universiti Malaya Students Union,” said Jaafar.

“Now he is going to transform PKR from the party that has only one seat into a major player on the national scene,” he said.

To keep petrol prices low

When Anwar eventually took to the lectern, the crowd warmed to his pledge that he would reduce the price of petrol because of the “swelling profits of Petronas”.

“In the eight years I was finance minister, the price per litre of petrol was only RM1.10. I once raised it by three cents but returned it to the old price when I saw we could afford the government subsidy and that was when Petronas was making about RM30 billion a year,” he said.

“Now they are making RM70 to 80 billion a year and they want to raise the price of oil,” he said to a chorus of derision from the crowd.

At Paya Mengkuang, addressing a crowd of about 200 mainly Chinese pig farmers and petty traders, he said: “You have been at your occupation for three to four decades. If the proper environmental protections are taken, there is no need to disrupt you all from the occupation that has assured your livelihood all this while.

“If there is a need to stop you from pig farming here, you must be given an alternative site to earn your living. Islam does not stop non-Muslims from earning their living at occupations they have long been doing,” said Anwar to applause from his audience.

Last year, the farmers had come under state government pressure to close their farms because of alleged environmental harm done by pig effluents. An uproar by the farmers led to a halt in the pressure and a tenuous truce prevails.