Mohd Shahid Bin Mohd Said v Xinyi Energy Smart (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd (MA-23NCvC-5-10/2022)

MOHD SHAHID BIN MOHD SAID (No. K/P: 750112-01-6879) [Mendakwa sebagai bapa yang sah dan orang tanggungan kepada MUHAMMAD UMAR BIN MOHD SHAHID (No. K/P: 991220-01-6785) (si mati)]

SITI NORBAYA BINTI MOHAMED (No. K/P: 770115-01-5984) [Mendakwa sebagai ibu yang sah dan orang tanggungan kepada MUHAMMAD UMAR BIN MOHD SHAHID (No. K/P: 991220-01-6785) (si mati)] ... PLAINTIE-P ... PLAINTIF-PLAINTIF DAN XINYI ENERGY SMART (MALAYSIA) SDN. BHD. [No. Syarikat: 201401043955 (1120141-K)] ... DEFENDAN GROUNDS OF JUDGMENT A WORD OF APPRECIATION TO COUNSEL [1] Before anything else is said, it is right that the Court places on record its appreciation of counsel on both sides. The question determined in these Grounds was raised by the Court of its own motion, and its proper resolution called for research of unusual depth and range: into the legislative history of Act 4 across more than half a century, into the parliamentary record, into the cognate Indian provision and its treatment by the Supreme Court of India, and into the exclusive-remedy legislation of the wider Commonwealth. Counsel accommodated every direction of the Court to carry out further research without demur, returned on each occasion within the time appointed with materials of genuine scholarship, and argued their respective causes with skill, candour and courtesy. The professionalism and patience they displayed, not least in a matter attended by real legal difficulty and, on one side, by real grief, were of the highest order, and the excellence of the research material they placed before the Court has been of invaluable assistance in the preparation of these Grounds. Such conduct exemplifies the finest traditions of the Bar, and the Court records its indebtedness to counsel in terms. INTRODUCTION [2] By a ruling delivered on 29.06.2026, this Court, acting on its own motion under Order 14A rule 1 of the Rules of Court 2012, determined that a discrete question of law arising in this action was suitable for determination without a full trial, and that its determination would either dispose of the whole action or substantially do so. The Court accordingly framed the question, vacated the trial dates, and reserved its answer pending the further submissions of the parties. Having now heard the parties under Order 14A rule 1(3), I deliver these Grounds in answer to the question reserved. [3] The action arises out of the death of one Muhammad Umar bin Mohd Shahid ("the deceased"), who died on 09.02.2022 in the course of his employment at the Defendant's premises in this State. The Plaintiffs are the parents of the deceased. They sue as his dependants, claiming general, special, aggravated and exemplary damages under sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956, on the footing that the death was occasioned by the Defendant's negligence as employer in failing to provide a safe system of work. The Defendant's answer, in substance, is a single point of law: that the deceased was an "insured person" under the Employees' Social Security Act 1969 (Act 4) ("Act 4"), that his death arose from an "employment injury" within the meaning of that Act, and that section 31 of Act 4 therefore operates as a complete statutory bar to the present suit. [4] The question is one of some general importance. It engages not only the reach of section 31 of Act 4 against a dependency claim, but the further and more contested question whether that bar, if it applies, extends to claims for aggravated and exemplary damages. That second question has been the subject of observations by the Court of Appeal in Rajendiran Manickam & Anor v Palmamide Sdn Bhd & Anor [2020] 6 MLRA 337 which, on one reading, sit uneasily with the earlier pronouncement of the Federal Court. The Plaintiffs go further. They contend that the Federal Court authority upon which the Defendant relies was decided upon a different and now superseded statutory text, and in particular upon a provision section 42 of Act 4 - which has since been repealed, with the consequence that that authority no longer holds the field. It falls to this Court to address these contentions directly. THE BACKGROUND AND THE MATERIAL FACTS [5] The facts material to the question are not in dispute, and indeed the determination of the question rests upon their being admitted. On the pleadings, it is admitted that the deceased was at all material times an employee of the Defendant; that he was an "insured person" within the meaning of Act 4; that contributions were made by the Defendant in respect of him under that Act; and that the injury which caused his death was an "employment injury" sustained as an employee under the Act. These admissions appear from the pleadings, read together with the documents in Part A of the common bundle among them the letter of appointment dated 02.11.2021, the salary slips, the death certificate and the Borang 34 - and they were not retracted before me. [6] The deceased was an operator engaged under a letter of appointment dated 02.11.2021, at a wage subject to statutory deductions for, among others, the Social Security Organisation. He died in the course of the loading of pallets of glass into a container at the Defendant's premises. The cause of death recorded in the death certificate is "Multiple Injuries Consistent With Impact By Heavy Object (Industrial Injury)". The Plaintiffs plead, as a particular of negligence, that a strapping belt securing the pallets failed, causing a pallet to fall upon the deceased; that allegation is denied by the Defendant, and I record it as a pleaded particular upon which I make no finding, for nothing in the question reserved turns upon the precise mechanism of the accident. It is also not in dispute that the Plaintiffs themselves lodged a claim for dependants' benefits with the Social Security Organisation under Act 4 in respect of the death; I return to the significance of that step when I come to the Plaintiffs' contention that their claim lies outside the Act. [7] It is important to be precise about what is admitted and what is not. The admission that the deceased was an insured person, and that his death was an employment injury, is an admission directed to the statutory predicate of section 31; it is not an admission of liability. The Plaintiffs continue to assert negligence - in particular, a failure to maintain a safe system of work-and the Defendant continues to deny it. There remain, on the pleadings, live controversies as to breach, contributory fault, and quantum. [8] Those remaining controversies do not, however, bear upon the question of law reserved. The question assumes the very matters that are admitted and asks whether, those matters being admitted, the action can proceed at all. If section 31 bars the claim, the disputed questions of negligence and quantum never arise for trial; they fall away entirely. If it does not, they must be tried in the ordinary way. The answer to the question is thus dispositive either way, and it turns upon the admitted facts and the construction of a statute, not upon contested evidence. [9] I therefore approach the question on the admitted factual premise stated in the ruling of 29.06.2026, and I express no view upon the disputed allegations of negligence, which are not before me. THE QUESTION FOR DETERMINATION AND THE MANNER IN WHICH IT WILL BE ANSWERED [10] The question reserved for determination, as framed in the ruling of 29.06.2026, is in these terms: It being admitted on the pleadings that the deceased was an "insured person" and that his death was an "employment injury" within the meaning of Act 4, whether section 31 of Act 4 bars the Plaintiffs' claims against the Defendant under sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956; and, if it does, whether the bar extends to the claims for aggravated and exemplary damages. [11] The question contains two limbs, and they fall to be taken in turn. The first asks whether section 31 reaches a dependency claim brought under sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956; the second, which arises only if the first is answered against the Plaintiffs, asks whether the bar extends to the claims for aggravated and exemplary damages. Questions of this nature admit of only one sound method. The answer must be found, first and last, in the statute itself: in the words Parliament has enacted, read in their context and in the light of the history through which they assumed their present form a history upon which, indeed, the principal challenge to the bar is founded. But the words do not fall to be read in isolation. They have been construed authoritatively by the Federal Court, whose decisions bind this Court and must accordingly be examined with corresponding care; the settled principles of interpretation will do their work where the language calls for them, and not as incantation; and where the meaning of the enactment is genuinely illuminated by legitimate external aids, including the parliamentary record, those aids will be consulted. The experience of other Commonwealth jurisdictions with legislation of the same family, and the decisions of the Supreme Court of India upon the cognate provision, have also been considered; but they are noticed strictly by way of confirmation, and they form no part of the grounds of decision, which rest upon Malaysian law alone. No conclusion is stated upon either limb until the whole of this material has been weighed. One discipline, finally, is observed throughout: the task of the Court is to answer the two limbs framed on 29.06.2026 and nothing beyond them, and contentions falling outside the question are noticed only so far as is necessary to explain why they are not determined. THE GOVERNING STATUTORY FRAMEWORK [12] Section 31 of Act 4, in its terms applicable to this action, provides: An insured person or his dependants shall not be entitled to receive or recover from the employer of the insured person, or from any other person who is the servant of the employer, any compensation or damages under any other law for the time being in force in respect of an employment injury sustained as an employee under this Act: Provided that the prohibition in this section shall not apply to any claim arising from motor vehicle accidents where the employer or the servant of the employer is required to be insured against Third Party Risks under Part IV of the Road Transport Act 1987. [13] Two features of the current text deserve emphasis. The first is that the prohibition is expressed to bind not only the insured person but "his dependants", and to defeat the recovery of "any compensation or damages under any other law". The second is the proviso, which carves out only claims arising from motor-vehicle accidents within Part IV of the Road Transport Act 1987. The present is a factory accident, not a motor-vehicle accident; the proviso is not engaged, and nothing turns upon it directly. It does, however, carry significance of a different order, to which I return when I come to construe the bar, for the presence of a single, narrowly drawn exception is itself a guide to the width of the prohibition that surrounds it. [14] The Plaintiffs' cause of action is founded on sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956. Section 7(1) provides: Whenever the death of a person is caused by wrongful act, neglect or default, and the act, neglect or default is such as would, if death had not ensued, have entitled the party injured to maintain an action and recover damages in respect thereof, the party who would have been liable if death had not ensued shall be liable to an action for damages, notwithstanding the death of the person injured, and although the death has been caused under such circumstances as amount in law to an offence under the Penal Code [Act 574]. Section 8(1) provides, so far as material: Subject to this section, on death of any person all causes of action subsisting against or vested in him shall survive against, or, as the case may be, for the benefit of, his estate ... and section 8(2)(a), which is invoked in relation to the punitive heads, provides: Where a cause of action survives as aforesaid for the benefit of the estate of a deceased person, the damages recoverable for the benefit of the estate of that person—(a) shall not include any exemplary damages, any damages for bereavement made under subsection 7(3A), any damages for loss of expectation of life and any damages for loss of earnings in respect of any period after that person's death ... It is elementary, and the statutory language of section 7(1) is explicit, that the right conferred by section 7 is derivative: it arises only where the act, neglect or default is "such as would, if death had not ensued, have entitled the party injured to maintain an action and recover damages". The dependants' claim is thus parasitic upon the existence of a viable cause of action in the deceased; if the deceased could not have recovered, neither can they. [15] Section 28A of the Civil Law Act 1956 is also invoked. Subsection (1) provides: In assessing damages recoverable in respect of personal injury which does not result in death, there shall not be taken into account—(a) any sum paid or payable in respect of the personal injury under any contract of assurance or insurance, whether made before or after the coming into force of this Act; (b) any pension or gratuity, which has been or will or may be paid as a result of the personal injury; or (c) any sum which has been or will or may be paid under any written law relating to the payment of any benefit or compensation whatsoever in respect of the personal injury. It is, by its own terms, a provision concerned with the assessment of damages, and concerned with personal injury not resulting in death. Whether it can do the work the Plaintiffs ask of it is considered below. Finally, the definition of "law" in Article 160(2) of the Federal Constitution, which includes the common law in operation in the Federation, is the textual hinge upon which the Federal Court's construction of "any other law" in Tan Peng Loh v Lee Aik Fong & Anor [1982] 1 MLJ 74 turned. THE LEGISLATIVE HISTORY OF SECTION 31 AND THE REPEAL OF SECTION 42 [16] Because the Plaintiffs' principal argument is built upon the evolution of the statutory text, it is necessary to trace that evolution with precision. The history is conveniently and accurately set out by the Court of Appeal in Rajendiran Manickam (supra) at paragraphs [27] to [35], in the judgment of His Lordship Lee Swee Seng JCA (as His Lordship then was, and now a Judge of the Federal Court), whose learned and careful exposition I gratefully adopt. [17] When Act 4 was first enacted, section 31 was in a materially different form. The principal Act received the Royal Assent on 02.04.1969 and was gazetted on 10.04.1969, and section 31 was brought into force on 11.01.1971. In its original version it provided that an insured person or his dependants should not be entitled to receive or recover from the employer (i) any compensation under the Workmen's Compensation Ordinance 1952, or (ii) damages under any other law for the time being in force, in respect of an employment injury sustained as an employee under the Act. The bar, even in that original form, was thus already a bar in two parts, the second of which - "damages under any other law" - is the very language that survives in the section today. The Plaintiffs invoke the explanatory statement to the Bill of 1969, which they say discloses that the provision was framed to prevent an insured person from receiving, for the same period and the same incapacity, both compensation under the Workmen's Compensation Ordinance 1952 and benefits under the proposed Act. They draw from this that the original purpose was directed at double recovery alone. That the original section was concerned with double recovery as between two compensation regimes may readily be accepted; what does not follow is that the second limb of the bar - which speaks not of compensation under the Ordinance but of damages under any other law - was confined to the same object. The two limbs were distinct in terms, and it is the second which has survived. [18] The section was then recast by Act A814, the Employees' Social Security (Amendment) Act 1992, which amended section 31 with effect from 01.07.1985, the amending Act having received the Royal Assent on 30.01.1992 and been gazetted on 20.02.1992. By that amendment the express reference to the Workmen's Compensation Ordinance 1952 was removed, and the prohibition was left to operate generally upon "any compensation or damages under any other law". The effect of Act A814 was therefore not to narrow the damages bar but to distil it; what had been the second limb of the original section became the whole of the operative prohibition. It was urged upon me that the section in its present form has been in force since 01.07.1985. The submission is explicable, and to that extent well founded: as the Court of Appeal recorded in Ramli Samad v Pacific & Orient Insurance Co Sdn Bhd [2010] 1 CLJ 970, the amendment extending the prohibition to a servant of the employer was expressed to operate retrospectively from 01.07.1985. Nothing turns upon the point, for on any view the recasting of section 31 long antedated the repeal of section 42 upon which the Plaintiffs' argument depends. [19] Alongside section 31, the Act formerly contained section 42, which provided that when a person is entitled to any of the benefits provided by the Act, he shall not be entitled to receive any similar benefit admissible under the provisions of any other written law. Section 42 came into force on 01.01.1971, ten days before section 31 itself, and stood unamended from its enactment until its deletion in 1997. It was section 42, read together with section 31, that the Federal Court treated - as the report of Tan Peng Loh (supra) records - as constituting, in combination, a bar to a common law remedy against the employer. [20] By the Employees' Social Security (Amendment) Act 1997 (Act A981), which came into force on 01.05.1997, two changes were made which are central to the present argument. First, section 42 was deleted. Secondly, the same Amendment Act introduced into section 31 the proviso reproduced above, exempting claims arising from motor-vehicle accidents within Part IV of the Road Transport Act 1987: see Rajendiran Manickam (supra) at paragraph [32]. The present text of section 31 is accordingly the product of two amendments - Act A814 in 1992 and Act A981 in 1997 - and the companion provision, section 42, no longer forms part of the Act. The Plaintiffs fasten upon the fact that these two changes were the work of one and the same amending Act. The coincidence, they say, is not accidental: it reveals a deliberate parliamentary purpose to narrow a bar which had until then been fortified by the conjoint operation of sections 31 and 42. I return to that submission at paragraph [38] below. The evolution of the two provisions may be tabulated thus: Instrument and CommencementChange EffectedEffect upon the ProhibitionAct 4 of 1969 (Royal Assent 02.04.1969; gazetted 10.04.1969); section 31 in force 11.01.1971Section 31 enacted in its original two-limb form, precluding recovery from the employer of (i) compensation under the Workmen's Compensation Ordinance 1952 and (ii) damages under anyThe words "damages under any other law" present from the outset as the second limb of the bar other law for the time being in force, in respect of an employment injuryAct 4 of 1969; section 42 in force 01.01.1971Section 42 enacted: a person entitled to a benefit under the Act not entitled to receive any similar benefit admissible under any other written lawA companion rule against the duplication of similar statutory benefits, distinct in object from the damages bar in section 31Act A814, Employees' Social Security (Amendment) Act 1992 (Royal Assent 30.01.1992; gazetted 20.02.1992; operative retrospectively from 01.07.1985)Section 31 recast: the express reference to the Workmen's Compensation Ordinance 1952 removed; the prohibition left to operate generally upon "any compensation or damages under any other law"; the bar extended to a servant of the employerThe second limb of the original bar distilled into the whole of the operative prohibition, and its reach widened Act A981, Employees' Social Security (Amendment) Act 1997 (in force 01.05.1997)Section 42 deletedThe companion rule against the duplication of similar statutory benefits removed; the operative words of section 31 left untouchedAct A981 (in force 01.05.1997)Proviso inserted into section 31 excepting claims arising from motor-vehicle accidents within Part IV of the Road Transport Act 1987A single, narrowly drawn exception introduced; the generality of the bar otherwise left standing [21] It is against this history that the chronology of the Federal Court authority must be placed. Tan Peng Loh (supra) was decided upon the statutory text as it then stood. It was therefore decided not only before the deletion of section 42 by Act A981 in 1997, but before the recasting of section 31 itself by Act A814 in 1992. As the Court of Appeal observed in Rajendiran Manickam (supra) at paragraph [33], the Federal Court cases were "decided before the amendment that deleted s 42 in 1997". That observation is, as a matter of legislative chronology, unimpeachable, and the Plaintiffs are entitled to make of it what they fairly can. The weight it bears is a separate matter, to which I return in the analysis that follows. ANALYSIS AND DETERMINATION The First Limb: Whether Section 31 Bars the Claim Under Sections 7 and 8 The Rival Positions on the First Limb [22] The Defendant's contention is shortly stated. The deceased was an insured person; the death was an employment injury; section 31 in terms provides that an insured person "or his dependants" shall not be entitled to receive or recover from the employer any compensation or damages under any other law in respect of an employment injury. The Plaintiffs sue as dependants under sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956. Their right is, by the express words of those sections, derivative of the right the deceased would have had. Since the deceased, had he survived and sued, would have been met by the bar in section 31, the Plaintiffs can be in no better position. For this the Defendant relies upon the decision of the Federal Court in Tan Peng Loh (supra). The Defendant relies too upon Sambu Pernas Construction & Anor v Pitchakkaran Krishnan [1982] CLJ [Rep] 299, which it says is on all fours with the present case, being itself a dependency claim under sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956 in respect of a deceased insured employee, and upon Che Noh bin Yacob v Seng Hin Rubber (M) Sdn Bhd [1982] 1 MLJ 80 for the proposition that section 31 is a complete bar to any claim against the employer at common law. As to the repeal of section 42, the Defendant accepts that the section once stood alongside section 31 but contends that its removal does not water down the prohibition, the operative words of section 31 having survived intact. [23] The Plaintiffs' contention is more elaborate, and it is right to state it at its highest. It proceeds in stages. First, they say that what is barred by section 31 is a claim in respect of the deceased's employment injury; their claim, by contrast, is a claim in respect of his death and for their own loss as dependants, which they say is a different thing. They put the point in another way as well: the bar in section 31 is confined to compensation or damages "in respect of an employment injury sustained as an employee", and a dependant's claim for the loss of support occasioned by the death is not, they say, a claim sustained by them as employees at all, but a distinct and sui generis right conferred by the Civil Law Act 1956, directed to wage-replacement for the dependants rather than to the injury suffered by the deceased in his employment. Secondly, they invoke section 28A of the Civil Law Act 1956, contending that in the assessment of damages no account is to be taken of sums payable under any written law, so that the receipt of benefits under Act 4 cannot extinguish their cause of action. Thirdly, and at the centre of their case, they contend that the Federal Court authority is no longer governing because it was decided upon a statutory text since superseded: the bar it pronounced was a bar constructed out of sections 31 and 42 read together, and section 42 having been repealed, the foundation of that reasoning has been removed. In support of that reading they seek to distinguish the authorities relied upon against them, contending that Tan Peng Loh (supra), Che Noh bin Yacob (supra) and Ramli Samad (supra) were concerned with the claims of injured employees who survived, or with the position of co-employees and insurers, and not with a dependency claim arising from a death. They add that the benefits payable under the Socso scheme may fall well short of the damages recoverable at common law, and that a disparity of that order ought not to be visited upon a dependant save by words admitting of no doubt. They advance two further contentions. The first rests upon the Defendant's prosecution under the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994. They point to the report of the Department of Occupational Safety and Health, and to the Defendant's having been prosecuted and fined for a breach of section 15(1) of that Act in relation to the accident, and they contend that an employer who has been found to have offended against the safety legislation cannot be heard to invoke the protection of section 31, an employer being taken to undertake, as an implied term of the employment, to provide a safe system of work, and no person being permitted to profit from his own wrong. The second is a constitutional contention: that to read section 31 as extinguishing the dependants' cause of action altogether would deny them access to justice contrary to Article 5(1) of the Federal Constitution. [24] The Plaintiffs further rely upon Ketua Pengarah Pertubuhan Keselamatan Sosial v Tham Tian Siong [2007] 3 MELR 357 and Barat Estates Sdn Bhd & Anor v Parawakan Subramaniam & Ors [2000] 1 MLRA 404, as referred to in Chuah Kum Chai v Great FMCG Sdn Bhd [2021] PILRU 7, for the proposition that Act 4 is beneficent social legislation to be construed liberally in favour of the employee. They rely further upon the purposive and maximum-protection approach to beneficent legislation expounded by the Federal Court in PJD Regency Sdn Bhd v Tribunal Tuntutan Pembeli Rumah & Anor and other appeals [2021] 2 MLJ 60, at paragraphs [27], [31] and [36]; and they invoke the strict construction of provisions that abrogate existing rights, contending that section 31, so far as it takes away a common law remedy, must be read narrowly and against the party asserting the bar. To these they add a group of further contentions which sharpen the issues. The first is a submission of distinction: each of Sambu Pernas Construction (supra), Tan Peng Loh (supra) and Che Noh bin Yacob (supra), it is said, concerned a claim arising from personal injury sustained at work in the ordinary way, and not a claim by dependants arising from a death occasioned by the gross negligence of the employer. Here, it is emphasised, the Defendant was convicted under section 15(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994 and fined RM10,000.00 for failing to provide a safe system of work for the operation of loading glass into a twenty-foot container. Whether Parliament intended section 31 to shelter an employer whose gross negligence has cost an employee his life was, it is said, never raised in and never considered by any of the three decisions of 1982. The second is a submission upon section 28A of the Civil Law Act 1956, which came into force on 30.05.1975: the provision is said to be a mechanism directed at avoiding duplication in the computation of damages and not an absolute bar upon the claim itself, and reliance is placed upon the observation of His Lordship Lee Swee Seng JCA (as His Lordship then was) in Rajendiran Manickam (supra) that whether Parliament intended section 28A(1)(c) to apply to an employment injury is a question deserving of fuller argument at trial. The third is that, applying the approach in PJD Regency (supra), the true construction of section 31 as it now stands is that it prevents overlapping compensation for the same injury and does not abrogate wholesale the separate statutory rights conferred by sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956. The Statutory Predicate and the Elements of the Prohibition [25] The starting point on the first limb is the statutory predicate of section 31, and upon the admitted facts it is established in full: the deceased was an insured person, and his death arose from an employment injury sustained as an employee under the Act. The words of the section must then be measured against the claim as pleaded, and they present three elements. The prohibition binds an insured person "or his dependants"; it precludes them from receiving or recovering from the employer "any compensation or damages under any other law"; and it operates "in respect of" the employment injury. The present claim is brought against the employer alone; it is a claim for damages; and it arises out of the death caused by the employment injury. Whether the bar reaches the claim accordingly turns upon two questions of construction: first, whether the circumstance that the Plaintiffs sue as dependants, upon the right conferred by sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956, takes the claim outside the prohibition; and secondly, whether a claim under the Civil Law Act 1956 is a claim "under any other law" within the meaning of the section. I take the questions in that order, and I reach a concluded answer upon the limb only when both have been examined. The Case Law: The Federal Court Authorities [26] The first of these questions does not require a determination that the Plaintiffs answer the defined meaning of "dependant" in Act 4. That they are the parents of the deceased who sue under sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956 is not in dispute; but whether they satisfy the statutory definition of "dependant" in the Act is neither among the agreed facts nor necessary to decide. It is true that section 31 binds by its terms not the insured person alone but "his dependants", and that section 2(3) of Act 4 defines a "dependant" as one of the relatives of a deceased insured person there enumerated, so that the prohibition may be read as reaching the dependants of a deceased employee no less than the living employee himself. There is force in that reading, and I do not reject it; but I prefer not to rest the conclusion upon it, for a determination made to turn upon whether these Plaintiffs answer the statutory definition in every particular - a matter neither admitted nor necessary - would be the weaker for the dependence. The bar bites by a surer route. The right conferred by section 7 is derivative; the Plaintiffs can stand in no better position than the deceased; and the deceased, had he survived and sued his employer, would have been met squarely by section 31. Since his own claim against the employer would have failed, the claim of those who derive their right from him must fail with it. This is the very route by which the Federal Court reached its decision in Sambu Pernas Construction (supra), to which I turn in the next paragraph: the right of a dependant suing under section 7 can rise no higher than the right of the deceased, whatever the dependant's own standing under Act 4. [27] That conclusion is not merely available on the language; it is supported by the Federal Court authorities placed before me that are directly in point on the employer bar. In Tan Peng Loh (supra), an employee of the second respondent was injured in a road accident involving his employer's lorry, in the course of his employment, for which a fellow employee, the first respondent, was found solely to blame; the employer was a contributor to the social security scheme under the Act. The Federal Court, per Wan Suleiman FJ, held that by force of section 31 - read at that time with section 42 - the insured person was precluded from recovering damages from the employer in respect of the employment injury, because the words "any other law" embrace the common law by virtue of the definition of "law" in Article 160(2) of the Federal Constitution. The Court adopted the holding of the learned trial judge that section 31 "clearly prohibits the plaintiff or his dependants from receiving or recovering from his employer damages under any other law in respect of an employment injury". That holding governs the present case: the deceased could not have recovered against this Defendant employer, and the Plaintiffs, suing in his right, cannot do so either. Closer still to the present facts is the Federal Court's decision in Sambu Pernas Construction (supra), which was itself a dependency claim of the very kind now before me. There a workman was knocked down and killed by a fellow employee at her employer's work site; she had been an insured person under the Act; and her widower sued both the employer and the co-employee under sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956. The sole question was whether section 31 barred the suit against the employer. The Federal Court, per Salleh Abas FJ, applied the test inherent in section 7—whether the deceased, had she lived and sued, would have been entitled to recover against the party now sued—and held that, since the deceased would have been barred by section 31 from suing her employer, the dependant could be in no better position. The dependant suing under section 7, the Court held, "could not have a greater right of action than what the deceased herself had". The appeal of the employer was accordingly allowed and the claim against it barred, while the claim against the co-employee was left to stand. The parallel with the present case is exact, save that the Plaintiffs here sue the employer alone, against whom the bar admits of no qualification. Of the authorities placed before me, it is Sambu Pernas Construction (supra) that lies most directly in point. It is not merely close to the present facts; it is, in every material respect, the same case - a deceased insured employee, dependants suing under sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956, and a Federal Court holding that those dependants can possess no better cause of action than the deceased. Because the present action is itself a dependency claim, Sambu Pernas Construction (supra) governs it more directly than Tan Peng Loh (supra), which concerned the living employee's own suit, and it furnishes the surest foundation for the conclusion I have reached on this limb. That the bar against the employer is complete was settled earlier still in Che Noh bin Yacob (supra), where the Federal Court held that once a person is an insured person under the Act, section 31 is a complete bar to any claim against his employer at common law, the word "law" bearing the meaning assigned to it by Article 160(2) of the Federal Constitution. [28] It follows that the three decisions of 1982 cannot be put aside upon the footing that each concerned an ordinary claim for personal injury sustained at work, and none a dependency claim arising from a death. The suggested distinction is not borne out by the authorities themselves. Sambu Pernas Construction (supra) arose from a fatal accident: the insured employee was killed at her employer's work site, and her widower sued as a dependant under sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956. In its essential features it is the present case. A distinction said to place a line of authority beyond the facts must be tested against what the authorities decided, and here the very authority said to be distinguishable is the one that is indistinguishable. The further and separate point - that none of the 1982 decisions considered whether Parliament intended section 31 to protect a grossly negligent employer stands on a different footing, and is dealt with at paragraph [43] below. [29] It is right to notice the other half of Tan Peng Loh (supra), for it is instructive even though it does not assist the Plaintiffs. The Federal Court held that the bar did not extend to the fellow employee who caused the injury, because section 31 - unlike section 53 of the Indian Employees' State Insurance Act 1948, upon which, as the Federal Court there recorded, the Malaysian provision is based, and whose construction by the Supreme Court of India I notice below - deliberately omits the words "or any other person", and so leaves intact the right to sue a person other than the employer. The significance of that holding for the present case is not that it opens any door to the Plaintiffs, for their claim is against the employer alone; it is that it demonstrates how exactly the Federal Court read the section. The bar was held to reach precisely as far as the words go, and no further: it strikes down the claim against the employer in full, while sparing the claim against a person whom the section does not name. A provision construed with that degree of textual fidelity is not one into which a court may read unexpressed qualifications. That is a point to which I return on the second limb. It is worth adding that Parliament has since closed even the narrow gap that this fidelity left open. The very omission that spared the co-employee in Tan Peng Loh (supra) was later cured by amendment, which brought within the prohibition "any other person who is the servant of the employer" and was given retrospective effect to 01.07.1985: see Ramli Samad (supra), where the Court of Appeal recorded that the amendment was made to displace the co-employee exception recognised in Tan Peng Loh (supra). The trajectory of the section has thus been one of progressive widening, never of retreat. The Construction of "Any Other Law" [30] The conclusion reached above does not, in the end, depend upon authority alone. It is the conclusion that the language of section 31 compels when that language is approached in the orthodox way, and it is right that I should state the matter independently of the Federal Court decisions, for the construction of the words "any other law" is the point upon which the whole of the first limb turns. The proper method is settled. The court begins with the text, giving the words used their plain and ordinary meaning; it resorts to the wider aids of construction only where the natural reading of the words leaves the question unanswered. Applied here, the method does not carry the court far, because the words answer the question at the first step. The phrase is "any compensation or damages under any other law for the time being in force". The word "law" is not left at large: section 3 of the Interpretation Acts 1948 and 1967 [Act 388] itself assigns to "law" the meaning given by Article 160(2) of the Federal Constitution, which includes the common law in so far as it is in operation in the Federation. A claim in negligence under the Civil Law Act 1956 is therefore a claim "under any other law" on the plain statutory meaning of the word, the general statute law itself adopting the very constitutional definition upon which Tan Peng Loh (supra) proceeded. The Interpretation Acts thus confirm, from within the ordinary statute book, the route the Federal Court took through the Constitution, and the construction does not stand or fall with the authority alone. [31] Two further considerations confirm that reading and put it beyond doubt. The first is a constraint upon the judicial function. To read "any other law" as reaching some bodies of law but not the common law, or as reaching a claim for some heads of damages but not others, would be to read into the section a qualification that Parliament has not expressed. That the court may not do. It is settled that where the language of an Act is clear and explicit the court must give effect to it whatever the consequences may be; that the duty of the court is limited to interpreting the words used by the legislature and giving effect to them; and that the court is not entitled to read words into a statute unless a clear reason for it is found in the statute itself. No such reason is found in section 31; the word "any" admits of none. The second consideration is the ascertainable purpose of the provision, to which the court may have regard under section 17A of the Interpretation Acts 1948 and 1967, which directs that a construction promoting the purpose or object underlying an Act is to be preferred to one that would not. That purpose is ascertainable from the Act itself. The purpose or object underlying a provision is gathered first and foremost from the enactment read as a whole, and the scheme of Act 4, examined at paragraph [33] below, discloses it plainly: the substitution of an assured, no-fault statutory entitlement for the common law action in damages against the contributing employer. A construction that confines the prohibition in section 31 would defeat, not promote, that object. The purposive approach commanded by section 17A and the literal reading commanded by the words thus lead to one and the same conclusion: a claim for damages against the employer under the Civil Law Act 1956 is a claim "under any other law" and is caught by the bar. The choice which section 17A prescribes - between a construction that would promote the purpose or object underlying the Act and one that would not - can only arise where the provision is capable of bearing two or more meanings. Where the language of a provision is plain and unambiguous, section 17A has no application, for the question of another meaning does not arise: All Malayan Estates Staff Union v Rajasegaran & Ors [2006] 4 CLJ 195, per Augustine Paul FCJ. Section 31 is such a provision. The purposive direction is accordingly engaged, if at all, by way of confirmation; and confirmation is all it yields, for the letter and the purpose of the section here coincide. It remains to notice the parliamentary history of the 1969 Bill, invoked in aid of a narrower reading of the section upon the footing that the debates upon that Bill might disclose an intention to preserve the dependants' common law remedy. The history cannot bear that weight. The present section 31 is not the section enacted in 1969 but the product of the amendments of 1992 and 1997. The debates of 1969, directed to a differently worded provision, could not displace the plain meaning of the words Parliament has since enacted and carried forward, and no occasion arises to resort to them. The same answer disposes of the reliance placed upon the explanatory statement to the 1969 Bill: an explanatory statement to a Bill that has twice been amended out of its original shape cannot govern the construction of the words that have replaced it. The parliamentary material directed to the amending Acts themselves stands upon a different footing, and I return to it - strictly by way of confirmation, the words being plain - at paragraphs [37] and [39] below. [32] There is a further textual indication, drawn from the structure of the section itself, which puts the width of the prohibition beyond argument. Section 31 contains a single proviso, exempting claims arising from motor-vehicle accidents within Part IV of the Road Transport Act 1987. It is settled that a proviso operates to except from the enacting words something which, but for the proviso, would have fallen within them; its proper office is to qualify or carve out, not to enlarge. The presence of the motor-vehicle proviso therefore carries a necessary implication: that, but for its enactment, a claim arising from a motor-vehicle accident—a claim in negligence at common law, brought against the employer or his servant—would itself have been barred by the enacting words. If the words "any compensation or damages under any other law" are wide enough to catch even a third-party motor-vehicle claim, and to require an express proviso to release it, they are necessarily wide enough to catch an ordinary common law action for negligence arising from a factory accident, for which no proviso exists. The proviso is thus not merely an illustration of expressio unius est exclusio alterius; it is affirmative proof of the reach of the enacting words, for Parliament does not legislate to exempt from a prohibition a claim that the prohibition would not otherwise have caught. The present action, being a factory accident outside the proviso, falls squarely within the unqualified prohibition. This consideration is independent of authority and, in my view, conclusive of the first limb on the language alone. That this is no abstraction appears from Tan Peng Loh (supra) itself, which was a road-accident case decided upon section 31 as it then stood, before the proviso existed. The bar was applied to defeat the injured employee's claim against his employer; and the very species of claim that the 1997 proviso now lifts out of section 31 was, before that proviso, caught by the enacting words. The proviso was therefore required precisely because the prohibition was otherwise wide enough to reach it—and a prohibition of that width reaches with greater ease the present factory claim, which no proviso touches. There is a further consideration, anterior to authority, supplied by the settled principle that an Act of Parliament must be read as a whole, each provision construed in harmony with the scheme of which it forms part and not as an isolated command. Section 31 does not stand alone in Act 4. It is one member of an integrated design under which the insured person and, upon his death, his dependants are assured of benefits payable out of a fund built from compulsory contributions, without proof of fault, without abatement for contributory negligence, and without exposure to the hazard of the employer's insolvency. Within that design the prohibition in section 31 is not an intrusion upon the beneficent provisions; it is their structural counterpart. The assured benefit and the barred action are the two faces of a single legislative bargain: the one is conferred because the other is withdrawn. To construe the prohibition narrowly in the name of the Act's beneficence is therefore to set one part of the Act against another, which the principle of harmonious construction forbids. The section takes its meaning from the scheme, and the scheme presupposes that the statutory benefit is substituted for, and not merely superadded to, the common law action against the contributing employer. The Act, for its part, secures dependants' benefits, irrespective of fault, to those who qualify as dependants within its terms; the design itself thus makes provision for the very loss which the barred action would otherwise have addressed. A construction of section 31 under which the statutory benefit and the common law action could run together against the same contributing employer would not vindicate the scheme; it would dismantle the equilibrium upon which the scheme rests. The Supersession Argument and the External Aids to Interpretation [34] I come now to the argument upon which the Plaintiffs principally rely against this authority: that Tan Peng Loh (supra) was decided upon a statutory scheme that has since changed, and in particular upon section 42, which no longer exists. The argument is a serious one and must be met directly. It is, however, in my judgment unsound, for three reasons. [35] First, the operative words upon which the construction turned have survived every amendment intact. The bar in Tan Peng Loh (supra) was pronounced upon the words "damages under any other law ... in respect of an employment injury". Those words were present in the original section 31 as its second limb; they were retained, and indeed isolated and given general operation, by Act A814 in 1992; and they remain the heart of the section today. A decision construing statutory words is displaced by a later amendment only where the amendment alters the words construed. Here the amendments did not weaken those words; if anything, Act A814 strengthened them by stripping away the now-redundant reference to the Workmen's Compensation Ordinance and leaving the general damages bar to stand alone. A construction placed by the Federal Court upon words that Parliament has since preserved is not undermined by Parliament's preservation of them. [36] Secondly, the role of section 42 in the reasoning must not be overstated. It is true that the report of Tan Peng Loh (supra) expresses the employer bar by reference to sections 31 and 42 together, and the Plaintiffs are entitled to fasten upon that conjunction. But the two provisions did different work, and it was section 31, not section 42, that spoke to a claim of the present kind. Section 31 was, and is, a bar upon the recovery of "compensation or damages under any other law" from the employer - that is, a bar upon a damages action of the sort the Plaintiffs bring. Section 42 was a bar of a different character: it prevented a person entitled to a benefit under the Act from receiving a similar benefit admissible under any other written law - that is, it addressed the duplication of statutory benefits, not the recovery of common law damages. The claim here is a claim for damages against the employer, and it is section 31 that prohibits it. Section 42, where it was invoked, was a reinforcement directed at a different mischief; its removal leaves the operative prohibition standing. This reading is confirmed by the trial judge's holding adopted in Tan Peng Loh (supra), which rested the prohibition of damages "under any other law" squarely on section 31 itself. It is confirmed, too, by the very words of the repealed provision. Section 42 spoke of a "similar benefit admissible under the provisions of any other written law". Damages at common law for negligence are neither a "benefit" nor "admissible under" any "written law"; they are recoverable under the general law upon proof of a tort. A provision so worded could never have been the source of the bar upon a common law action, and its repeal cannot have removed a bar it never imposed. That reading is confirmed by the reasoning the Federal Court adopted as its own. The passage upon which reliance is placed is not, in truth, an independent pillar of the decision. It comes from the judgment of the court below—that of Abdul Hamid FJ, sitting in the High Court—which the Federal Court, per Wan Suleiman FJ, set out verbatim and with which it declared its complete agreement. There, section 42 was described as a provision to be borne in mind "apart from" section 31(ii): that is, as an addition to a prohibition that section 31(ii) had already supplied. A provision introduced as something to be weighed apart from the operative section cannot have been that section's foundation; and its later repeal accordingly leaves the bar in section 31 exactly where the courts placed it. [37] Thirdly, the legislative history points in precisely the opposite direction to that for which the Plaintiffs contend. When Parliament amended section 31 in 1997 by Act A981, it did so against the settled background of the Federal Court's construction of the section. Parliament is taken to legislate with knowledge of the established judicial interpretation of the words it re-enacts or amends. Having that construction before it, Parliament chose to introduce one - and only one - express exception to the bar: the carve-out for motor-vehicle accidents within Part IV of the Road Transport Act 1987. Had Parliament intended, on that occasion, to admit any residual common law claim against the employer - whether for damages generally, or for the punitive heads that trouble the Plaintiffs here - the 1997 amendment was the natural and obvious occasion to say so. It did not. The deliberate insertion of a single, narrowly drawn exception confirms, on the principle expressio unius est exclusio alterius, the generality and continuing force of the bar in every case the exception does not reach. The repeal of section 42 cannot be pressed into service as a silent and oblique repeal of a damages bar that Parliament was at the very same moment confirming and refining. Repeal by implication is not favoured. A later enactment displaces an earlier provision only where the two are so inconsistent that they cannot stand together; leges posteriores priores contrarias abrogant operates upon contradiction, not upon the mere removal of a companion section. No such inconsistency arises here, for the deletion of section 42 left the operative words of section 31 wholly untouched. This reading of the legislative trajectory is borne out by Ramli Samad (supra) in which the Court of Appeal traced the successive amendments to section 31 and treated each as operating to enlarge, and never to relax, the prohibition - so much so that the bar was held to extend even to the employer's insurer, who stands in the employer's shoes, with the result that the injured person could recover nothing under any other law. A provision that Parliament has repeatedly strengthened in this way is not one whose force can be supposed to have been silently diminished by the removal of a companion section directed at a different mischief. The parliamentary record points the same way, and I notice it strictly by way of confirmation of a meaning which the words themselves supply. In the course of the debates of 14.12.1978 upon amendments to the Act, it was urged that section 31 be further amended so as to confer upon the injured worker an election - satu pilihan, satu choice - between suing the employer for negligence under the common law and claiming the benefits of the scheme, the provision as it stood being said to deny the worker recourse to the courts even upon proof of the employer's negligence. No such amendment was made, and the bar was maintained. Parliament has therefore been squarely invited to convert the prohibition into an election of the very kind that other statutory schemes, noticed later in these Grounds, create by express enactment; it declined the invitation, and a bar which Parliament has been asked to relax, and has left standing, is not readily to be treated as having been relaxed by a side-wind. [38] The argument from the simultaneity of the two changes made by Act A981 must be met on its own terms, for it is the centrepiece of the Plaintiffs' case. The proposition is that the deletion of section 42 and the insertion of the motor-vehicle proviso, being the work of a single amending Act, disclose a common purpose of narrowing the bar. The premise is sound; the inference is not. That Parliament made two changes on one occasion tells one nothing about the direction of either unless the changes point the same way, and these do not. The insertion of a proviso is an act of exception. It presupposes the enacting words, leaves them otherwise untouched, and releases from them a defined and narrow class of claim; it is, in its very nature, an affirmation of the prohibition it qualifies. The deletion of section 42, by contrast, removed a provision which, for the reasons given at paragraph [36] above, never spoke to a damages action at all. To read the two together as a single narrowing measure is to assume the conclusion the argument is meant to establish. And the argument proves too much in another way. If Parliament, addressing its mind to section 31 in 1997 and taking the trouble to release one class of claim from its operation, had also intended to release the claims of dependants, or the punitive heads of damages, it had the amending Act in its hands and the occasion at its disposal. It released the motor-vehicle claim, and nothing else. The width of what Parliament left standing is measured by the narrowness of what it took away. [39] As to what the deletion of section 42 was intended to achieve, the Court of Appeal in Rajendiran Manickam (supra) at paragraphs [34] and [35] offered an explanation which I find persuasive and which is fatal to the Plaintiffs' use of the repeal. Section 42 had operated to prevent the duplication of benefits as between Act 4 and the Workmen's Compensation Act 1952. By 1997 the practical utility of the Workmen's Compensation Act 1952 had dwindled almost to vanishing point for Malaysian workers, who are covered by the more generous scheme of Act 4; the Workmen's Compensation Act remained in use mainly for foreign workers outside the Socso scheme. The deletion of section 42 is fully explicable as the removal of a provision that had ceased to serve any real purpose. As the Court of Appeal held, the deletion "cannot be to allow for a claim now under both the SOCSO Act as well as the Workmen's Compensation Act 1952". Still less can it be read as a covert legislative invitation to reopen the common law action against the employer that section 31 had, on settled authority, closed. It is not without significance that this explanation of the repeal comes from the very decision upon which the Plaintiffs otherwise rely. A party who invokes Rajendiran Manickam (supra) for its observations upon the second limb cannot disregard its reasoning upon the first. The parliamentary record relating to Act A981 itself—the material most nearly directed to the words now in force, and again consulted strictly by way of confirmation—bears that explanation out. When the Bill which became Act A981 was debated in the Dewan Negara on 17.12.1996, its two material clauses were explained in terms that correspond exactly with the analysis set out above: the amendment to section 31 was explained as permitting an insured person who suffers an employment injury caused by a motor-vehicle accident, or his dependants, to claim compensation or damages from the employer, or from the employer's servant, required to be insured against Third Party Risks under Part IV of the Road Transport Act 1987; and the deletion of section 42 was explained as permitting persons entitled to any benefit under the Act also to receive similar benefits provided under any other written law. The deletion was thus presented to Parliament as a measure concerned with the receipt of similar statutory benefits, and with nothing else; not a word was said of restoring the common law action in damages against the employer. And the confinement of section 42 to that modest office was declared at its birth: when the original Bill was debated on 12.02.1969, the concern that clause 42 might deprive an injured worker of motor-insurance recoveries was met by the ministerial assurance that an insured person could indeed claim compensation under the common law from the third party, section 42 barring only a benefit under a written law similar to the benefit provided by the Act, in order to avoid duplicate payments. From first to last, therefore, section 42 was a rule against the duplication of similar statutory benefits; it neither created nor sustained the bar upon the common law action against the employer, and its deletion cannot have released what it never restrained. [40] For these reasons the supersession argument fails. The Federal Court authority is not spent. It construes words that remain in force; the operative prohibition it pronounced rests upon section 31; and the post-1997 text - so far from displacing it - reinforces it. In particular, when Parliament deleted section 42 by Act A981 in 1997, it left wholly intact the operative words of section 31—the prohibition upon an insured person or his dependants recovering "any compensation or damages under any other law" from the employer in respect of an employment injury. Those are the very words upon which the Federal Court's construction rests, and their survival is decisive: the repeal of a companion provision directed at a different mischief cannot be read as an implied reversal of an interpretation fixed upon words that Parliament chose to preserve. The Remaining Arguments on the First Limb [41] The Plaintiffs' remaining contentions on the first limb may be dealt with more shortly. The distinction they press—between a claim in respect of injury and a claim in respect of death cannot stand against the derivative character of the section 7 claim. The right of the dependants is, by the express words of section 7, contingent upon the deceased having been able to "maintain an action and recover damages" had death not ensued. Where, as here, the deceased could not have maintained such an action against his employer because section 31 would have barred it, the derivative right never arises. The label the Plaintiffs attach to their loss does not alter the source of their right, which is, and remains, the cause of action that the deceased would have had. The Plaintiffs' further submission, that the words "sustained as an employee" confine the bar to a claim by the employee in that capacity and leave a dependant's claim untouched, misreads the phrase. Those words qualify the injury—an employment injury sustained by the deceased as an employee—and not the capacity of the person who sues; were it otherwise, the express extension of the bar to "his dependants" would be deprived of content, for dependants do not sue as employees at all. The characterisation of the dependants' right as sui generis proves too little: however the right be classified, section 7 makes it derivative of the deceased's, and the derivative right can rise no higher than its source. These distinctions find no purchase upon Sambu Pernas Construction (supra), which was itself a dependency claim arising from the death of an insured employee and in which no such distinction was thought to avail. The distinction is, in any event, answered by the language of section 31 itself. The bar is upon recovery "in respect of an employment injury", and the expression "in respect of" is among the widest in the statute book, denoting a connection or relation between the claim and the injury rather than an identity of subject-matter. A claim founded upon the death is, beyond argument, a claim "in respect of" the employment injury that caused it, for the death is the injury in its fatal consequence. To read the bar as reaching the living employee's claim for his injury but releasing the dependants' claim for his death arising from the self-same injury would be to confine a deliberately wide expression to a narrow compass the words do not support, and would produce the incongruous result that the bar is defeated by the very gravity of the injury that proves fatal. The words do not permit so capricious an operation. Nor are the words "any compensation or damages" to be read as confined to compensation of the kind the Socso scheme itself provides, so that only claims duplicating the scheme's benefits are barred. The prohibition is upon "any compensation or damages under any other law", and the width of the word "any", twice repeated, does not admit of so confined a reading. For the like reason nothing turns upon the characterisation of the dependants' loss—the loss of support and of dependency—as a loss different in kind from the wage-replacement and kindred benefits which the scheme provides. The bar does not operate upon a taxonomy of losses; it operates upon claims, by their connection with the employment injury, and it strikes at "any compensation or damages" so connected, whatever the description of the loss for which they are sought. [42] Nor does section 28A of the Civil Law Act 1956 assist. The section is concerned with the assessment of damages, not with the existence of the entitlement to sue. It presupposes a subsisting and recoverable cause of action and directs how, in quantifying the award, certain collateral benefits are to be disregarded. It does not, and could not, revive a cause of action that section 31 has extinguished. There is, moreover, a textual difficulty fatal to the argument: section 28A by its opening words operates in respect of "personal injury which does not result in death", whereas the present claim is founded squarely on the death of the deceased. On its own terms the provision does not reach this case at all. The further submissions now made upon the section do not improve the position; they confirm the reading I have given it. That section 28A came into force on 30.05.1975, and that its office is to prevent duplication in the computation of damages, is accepted, and it is precisely for that reason that the section cannot do the work required of it: a provision which regulates how an award is to be computed presupposes that there is an award to compute, and says nothing whatever about whether the action lies. Section 31 operates a stage earlier, upon the entitlement itself. A rule of assessment cannot be made to carry a rule of entitlement. I note that Rajendiran Manickam (supra), at paragraphs [36] to [38], treated the application of section 28A to an employment injury as a matter fit to be argued at trial; but that was said in the context of a striking-out application, where the threshold was only arguability. Under Order 14A the question must be answered, and on the plain words of section 28A the answer is that it governs the assessment of damages in a subsisting personal-injury claim and has nothing to say to a claim founded on death which section 31 has already barred. It may be added that a direction to the like effect appears within section 7 of the Civil Law Act 1956 itself in relation to claims founded upon a death: sums received by way of benefit under any other written law are not to be taken into account in the assessment of the damages. The family resemblance confirms the analysis. Provisions of this kind are rules of computation within a subsisting action; and they cohere precisely with the deletion of section 42, for a person entitled to benefits under Act 4 may now receive similar benefits under any other written law, and the rules of disregard ensure that such receipts do not diminish an award where an award lies. None of this touches the anterior question whether an action against the employer lies at alland that question section 31, and section 31 alone, answers. Nor can the Defendant's prosecution under the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994 disapply the bar. The contention proceeds upon a mistaken premise. Section 31 does not confer upon the employer a benefit or immunity conditioned upon his observance of the safety legislation; it enacts a statutory prohibition upon a class of claims, the counterpart of which is the no-fault entitlement to benefits that the Act secures for the insured person and his dependants irrespective of fault. The prohibition operates whether the employer was careful or careless, for the scheme is founded upon the exclusion of fault as the criterion of recovery. To engraft upon it an exception for the case of an employer who has offended against the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994 would be to introduce, by construction, the very fault-based inquiry that the scheme was designed to displace, and to do so upon words that admit of no such exception. The maxim that no man may profit from his own wrong cannot be pressed into that service, for the employer's liability to the penal and regulatory consequences of the 1994 Act is neither removed nor diminished by section 31; those consequences have, on the pleaded case, already been visited upon the Defendant by prosecution and fine. What section 31 withholds is a further remedy in damages against the employer under the general law, and it withholds it by force of a prohibition that Parliament has not qualified by reference to the employer's regulatory conduct. The particulars now pressed—that the Defendant was convicted under section 15(1) of the Act and fined RM10,000.00 in connection with the operation of loading glass into a twenty-foot container—do not alter the analysis. I record them as they are asserted; they are not among the admitted facts upon which the question is framed, and I make no finding upon them. But taking them at their highest, and assuming for the purpose of the argument that the Defendant's negligence was gross and that it caused the death, section 31 draws no distinction between degrees of fault, and neither may this Court. That the three decisions of 1982 did not consider whether Parliament intended to protect a grossly negligent employer is, as a matter of history, accurate. As a matter of construction it is beside the point. The section is not framed by reference to the quality of the employer's conduct, and a court cannot introduce such a criterion under the guise of construing a provision that contains none. To hold otherwise would be to make the operation of a statutory bar depend upon the very inquiry into fault which the statute was enacted to remove from the field. [44] The authorities on liberal construction relied upon by the Plaintiffs—Tham Tian Siong (supra) and Barat Estates (supra)—do not carry them further. A beneficent statute is construed liberally to advance its object, but liberal construction is a means of resolving ambiguity in favour of the protected class, not a licence to read a clear prohibition out of the Act. Where, as the Federal Court has held, the words of section 31 clearly prohibit recovery of damages from the employer, the canon of liberal construction has nothing upon which to operate. The reliance upon the purposive and maximum-protection approach expounded by the Federal Court in PJD Regency (supra), at paragraphs [27], [31] and [36], requires a fuller answer, for it was pressed with force. The principle for which that case stands is not in doubt, and I accept it without reservation: social legislation, enacted to regulate the relationship between a weaker and a stronger class, is to be construed so as to afford the protected class the fullest measure of protection its language admits, and ambiguity is to be resolved in favour of those it was enacted to protect. But the principle does not assist the Plaintiffs, for two reasons. The first is that it operates upon ambiguity, and section 31 is not ambiguous. A prohibition upon recovering "any compensation or damages under any other law" from the employer admits of no second meaning, and no measure of liberality can convert a prohibition into a permission. Maximum protection is a rule for choosing between competing constructions; it is not a warrant for creating one. The second is that the principle, applied faithfully to Act 4, tells against the Plaintiffs rather than for them. The protection which Act 4 confers upon the employee and his dependants is the assured, no-fault benefit, payable irrespective of proof of fault and irrespective of the employer's solvency. The price of that protection, deliberately exacted by Parliament, is the surrender of the common law action against the contributing employer. To construe section 31 so as to restore that action would not enlarge the protection which the statute affords; it would dismantle the bargain upon which the protection rests. The protected class is to be given the fullest measure of the scheme Parliament enacted, not of a scheme it did not. There is a further answer, drawn from PJD Regency (supra) itself. That decision holds, at paragraph [33], that in construing social legislation—where the State has intervened by statute to redress an inequality in bargaining power—the court must give effect to the intention of Parliament and not to the intention of the parties, lest the object of the legislation be rendered nugatory and illusory. That principle tells against the Plaintiffs, and not for them. The intention of Parliament, ascertained from the words it used and from the scheme of the Act, was to prohibit an insured person or his dependants from recovering compensation or damages from the contributing employer under any other law in respect of an employment injury. To read into section 31 a residual common law action preserved for the dependants would be to prefer the intention of a party to the intention of Parliament, and so to turn against its own purpose the very principle upon which the Plaintiffs rely. It is, in any event, double-edged: the object of Act 4 is to substitute a no-fault scheme of assured benefits for the hazards of common law litigation against the employer, and the bar in section 31 is the very mechanism by which that object is achieved. To the like effect is the maxim generalia specialibus non derogant. Act 4 is the special law, directed specifically to employment injury and the compensation payable for it, and the general provisions of the Civil Law Act 1956 must yield to it so far as the two would otherwise conflict. I have not overlooked that the maxim is capable of being turned the other way: if sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956 are regarded as conferring upon dependants a special right of action of their own, it might be said that the general words of section 31 ought not to be read as silently abrogating that special right. The inversion does not withstand examination, for two reasons. Specificity under the maxim is judged by subject matter, and upon that measure the positions are the reverse of those supposed: sections 7 and 8 are provisions of general application, governing every death occasioned by wrongful act whatever its setting, while Act 4 legislates specifically for employment injury and for the defined class of insured persons and their dependants; it is Act 4 that is the special law. And the maxim in any event guards only against derogation by implication, and has no office where the derogation is express: section 31 names "his dependants" in terms and denies them "any compensation or damages under any other law", so that nothing is left to implication and nothing remains for the maxim to protect. The point is reinforced by Che Noh bin Yacob (supra), where the Federal Court, adopting the dictum of Scott LJ in Croxford v Universal Insurance Co Ltd [1936] 2 KB 253, held that where the words of a statute are clear there is no room for the canons of interpretation that operate only upon ambiguity. The words of section 31 being, as that Court found, too clear to admit of doubt, the appeal to liberal construction is foreclosed at the threshold. For the same reason the canon that a provision abrogating rights is read strictly cannot avail the Plaintiffs: strict construction, like liberal construction, yields to clear and express words, and the words of section 31 are clear. The disparity between the scheme's benefits and common law damages, upon which the Plaintiffs lay emphasis, is a consideration of policy rather than of construction; I return to it, so far as it bears upon the punitive heads, when I come to the second limb. Nor is it any answer that Act 4 is beneficent legislation: in Che Noh bin Yacob (supra) the bar was upheld even against a contention that sections 31 and 42 were discriminatory and unconstitutional, the Federal Court treating the clarity of the words as decisive. [45] Because the Plaintiffs' case was pressed throughout upon the footing that Act 4 is social legislation, and because a construction that shuts out the claim of bereaved parents must be justified and not merely announced, it is right that I state fully why the answer I give is not a departure from the Act's protective purpose but a faithful application of it. The submission assumes that a construction barring the dependants' action diminishes the protection the Act confers. The assumption is mistaken, because it measures the Act's beneficence by the yardstick of the very common law action the Act was designed to replace. That action was never an assured remedy. It was contingent at every point: upon proof of negligence, which may fail; upon the resolution of contributory fault, which may reduce it; upon the delay and expense of litigation, which may exhaust it; and upon the solvency of the employer, which may defeat it altogether. What the Act confers in its place is a remedy stripped of each of those contingencies: benefits defined by law, payable without proof of fault, secured upon a common fund sustained by the compulsory contributions of every covered employer, and available to the dependants, as here, upon the death itself. That is the protection Parliament designed; and it is protection which many a claimant, defeated at trial or confronted by an employer without means, would have preferred to the chance of an action. The exclusivity of the statutory remedy is not a defect in that design; it is the mechanism which makes the design possible, for the fund rests upon contributions exacted on the footing that the contributing employer is not also exposed to actions in damages for the same injury. Nor can the bar be lifted for the hard case alone. A construction of section 31 admits of no such selectivity: to read the section as yielding here is to read it as yielding everywhere, and thereby to restore for the whole insured class the fault-based litigation, with all its hazards, that Parliament removed from the field. The apparent kindness to one claimant would be a disservice to the class the Act exists to protect. It is for these reasons - and not from any want of sympathy for the Plaintiffs, whose loss is not in doubt - that the liberality owed to social legislation cannot yield the result they seek. Liberality in the construction of Act 4 means giving the fullest effect to the scheme of assured, no-fault protection that Parliament enacted; it does not mean unravelling the exclusivity upon which that scheme is built. The Constitutional Contention There remains the Plaintiffs' contention founded upon Article 5(1) of the Federal Constitution: that to construe section 31 as extinguishing their cause of action is to deny them access to justice, and that the provision ought to be read down to avoid that result. I am unable to accept it. The argument equates access to justice with the preservation of a particular cause of action, but the two are not the same. Article 5(1) does not guarantee that every injury shall be remediable by an action for damages against a chosen defendant; it guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty save in accordance with law. Section 31 does not oust the jurisdiction of the courts, as the present proceeding itself demonstrates: the Plaintiffs have had unimpeded access to this Court, and the question whether their claim is barred has been fully argued and judicially determined. What the section does is not to close the doors of the court but to substitute, for the common law action against the employer, a statutory entitlement to no-fault benefits, an entitlement in respect of which the Plaintiffs have themselves lodged a claim under the scheme. [47] The starting point is the text. Article 5(1) provides that no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty save in accordance with law. Even upon the generous construction which treats "life" as comprehending more than mere existence, and which locates within it a right of access to justice, the guarantee is by its own terms honoured where the deprivation complained of is effected in accordance with law. Section 31 is law in the fullest constitutional sense: an Act of Parliament, general and prospective in its operation, enacted within the legislative competence of Parliament—a competence which has not been questioned before me—and administered through the ordinary courts. An Act of Parliament comes before the court, moreover, clothed in the presumption of constitutionality, and the burden of displacing that presumption rests upon the party asserting the invalidity. The Plaintiffs have discharged no such burden. Indeed they seek no declaration of invalidity at all, but only that the section be "read down"; and beyond the assertion that the result is a hard one - an assertion I have accepted, and answered, at paragraphs [44] and [45] above and at paragraph [71] below - nothing has been placed before me to show that section 31 transgresses any limit the Constitution imposes. [48] There is next the nature of the right which section 31 is said unconstitutionally to destroy. The dependency action is not a right of ancient common law standing, still less an entitlement conferred by the Constitution itself. At common law the death of a person afforded his dependants no cause of action at all; the right upon which the Plaintiffs sue is wholly the creature of statute, conferred by sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956 and defined, in every particular, by the words of those sections. A right which exists only because Parliament created it may be qualified, conditioned or withheld by the authority which conferred it, and Article 5(1) does not entrench the ordinary law of civil obligations as it stands at any given moment, nor convert every statutory cause of action into a constitutional right immune from legislative adjustment. Were it otherwise, every limitation period, every statutory immunity and every legislative cap upon damages would stand condemned as a deprivation of life, for each of them, no less than section 31, withdraws or restricts a remedy that would otherwise lie; and the Civil Law Act 1956 itself supplies the illustration from within, for section 8(2)(a) excludes exemplary damages from every claim for the benefit of an estate, and it has never been suggested that the exclusion offends Article 5(1). The constitutional guarantee protects the person; it does not petrify the law of remedies. [49] The decisive distinction is between provisions which impede access to the courts and provisions which define the substantive rights the courts exist to enforce. A right of access to justice, where it is engaged, is directed to the former: it guards against the closing of the court's doors, the ouster of its jurisdiction, and the imposition of conditions which render the vindication of rights illusory. Section 31 does none of these things. It ousts no jurisdiction; it shields no decision from scrutiny; it imposes no fee, no condition and no procedural obstacle upon suit. Whether the section applies to a given claim is itself a justiciable question for the ordinary courts, and it has been fully litigated here, upon full argument, to the determination now delivered. What the section does is to define the substantive content of the law: it enacts that, as against the contributing employer, the insured person and his dependants hold the statutory entitlement and not the common law action. The Plaintiffs' true complaint is accordingly not that they have been denied a hearing, but that the law, upon a full hearing, is against them. Article 5(1) guarantees that rights will be adjudicated according to law; it does not guarantee that the law, once ascertained, will furnish a remedy in damages against the defendant of one's choosing. To hold otherwise would be to constitutionalise the content of private law, and to place every legislative reform of the law of obligations under the shadow of Article 5(1); that is not a proposition I am able to accept. The contention was advanced with a further limb, which must be met in terms: that the judicial power of the Federation, vested in the courts and forming part of the basic structure of the Federal Constitution, cannot be absolutely fettered by an Act of Parliament, and that section 31, read as an absolute bar, works such a fetter. The premise of the submission may be accepted; its application cannot. The constitutional vice at which the jurisprudence on judicial power is directed is the ouster of the jurisdiction of the courts and the shielding of decisions from judicial scrutiny the removal from the courts of the power to adjudicate. Section 31 does nothing of the kind. It is a substantive rule of entitlement, enacted within a legislative competence not questioned before me and administered by the courts in the ordinary exercise of the judicial power; whether it applies to a given claim is itself a justiciable question, and the present determination is the judicial power in exercise, not in eclipse. A statute that defines the content of private rights does not fetter the judicial power by requiring the courts to give effect to it; were it otherwise, every statutory bar, immunity and limitation period would stand constitutionally suspect. The ouster-clause jurisprudence is accordingly not engaged, and the judicial-power limb of the contention fails with the first. [50] Two further considerations complete the answer. The first is that, even if the matter were tested upon the footing that section 31 restricts a protected interest and must therefore be justified, the justification appears upon the face of the Act. The section serves the legitimate legislative object examined at paragraphs [33] and [45] above—the establishment of a collective, no-fault scheme of assured protection—and it pursues that object by the most measured of means, for the common law action is not simply abolished but replaced by a statutory entitlement payable without proof of fault to those who qualify under the Act. Nothing in this justification turns upon whether these Plaintiffs themselves satisfy the statutory definition of "dependant", a matter I have not decided: the derivative bar examined at paragraph [26] above operates upon the deceased's cause of action, and holds whatever the Plaintiffs' own position under the scheme may prove to be; the Plaintiffs have, for their part, lodged a claim, and their entitlement is for the Social Security Organisation to determine according to the Act. A provision which withdraws an uncertain remedy and substitutes an assured one is not an instrument of oppression against which the Constitution must be mobilised. The second concerns the relief actually sought. To read a provision down is to confine it within constitutional limits so as to preserve its validity; the doctrine presupposes both a demonstrated constitutional excess and a narrower construction which the words can fairly bear. Neither is present here. No infirmity has been established which a reading down would cure, and the words of section 31, for the reasons given throughout these Grounds, admit of no narrower reading. What is sought under the name of reading down is in truth the judicial amendment of a valid enactment, and that is a power the courts do not possess. [51] The contention is, moreover, foreclosed by authority. In Che Noh bin Yacob (supra) the bar in section 31 was upheld against a direct challenge that it was discriminatory and unconstitutional, the Federal Court treating the clarity of the words as decisive. If the width of the prohibition, or the disparity between the statutory scheme and the common law remedy it displaces, is thought to work injustice in a case such as the present, the remedy lies in the hands of Parliament and not in a strained constitutional construction that the language will not bear. I therefore reject the constitutional contention. Cognate Provision [52] The conclusions reached above rest upon binding Malaysian authority and upon the words of section 31. It is right, nonetheless, to record that they are fortified by the construction placed upon the cognate Indian provision by the Supreme Court of India. I record at once the provenance and the status of these materials. The Indian decisions, and the Commonwealth legislation noticed in the section that follows, have been treated with the caution that course requires: they form no part of the grounds upon which the question reserved is answered - those grounds rest upon section 31, the admitted facts and the binding Malaysian authority alone - and they are recorded by way of observation only, so that the parties, and any court that may hereafter review this decision, may see that the conclusion independently reached under Malaysian law is consonant with, and nowhere contradicted by, the treatment of the cognate provision elsewhere. As already noted, section 31 was modelled upon section 53 of the Indian Employees' State Insurance Act 1948. The two provisions are not identical, and the divergences must be stated before the parallel is drawn. The Indian section bars recovery from the employer "or from any other person", without the limitation to a servant of the employer that section 31 imposes; and it bars compensation or damages under any other law "or otherwise", words for which section 31 has no counterpart. To that extent the Indian provision is the wider, and its construction by the Indian courts is persuasive only; it cannot govern the meaning of a differently worded Malaysian statute. But upon the question common to both provisions whether an exclusive statutory insurance scheme bars an insured employee, or those claiming through him, from recovering damages from the employer in respect of an employment injury—the reasoning of the Supreme Court of India is directly in point and, with respect, compelling. In A. Trehan v Associated Electrical Agencies & Anor (1996) 4 SCC 255 an insured employee under the Indian Act lost the sight of his left eye when a component of a television set he was repairing burst; having received benefits under that Act, he sought further compensation from his employer under the Workmen's Compensation Act 1923. The Supreme Court, per Nanavati J, held the claim barred by section 53. Two strands of the Court's reasoning bear directly upon the arguments advanced before me. The first meets the Plaintiffs' supersession argument. The Court held that when such a bar is created in clear and express terms "it would neither be permissible nor proper to infer a different intention by referring to the previous history of the legislation", for that would amount to "by-passing the bar and defeating the object of the provision". That is precisely the vice in the Plaintiffs' invitation to treat the repeal of section 42 as a silent relaxation of section 31. The second strand meets the appeal to liberal construction. The Supreme Court declined to follow the Full Bench of the Kerala High Court, which had reasoned that a beneficent welfare statute could not have been intended to bar the more advantageous claim; that view, the Court observed, had been arrived at without regard to the clear and express words of the section. The like answer holds here: the beneficent character of Act 4 cannot displace words whose meaning is plain. There is a further feature of Trehan (supra) which speaks directly to the argument built upon the repeal of section 42. The Indian Act contained - and the Supreme Court noticed - a companion provision, section 61, in terms materially identical to the repealed section 42: when a person is entitled to any of the benefits provided by that Act, he shall not be entitled to receive any similar benefits admissible under the provisions of any other enactment. Yet the Supreme Court located the bar upon the claim not in section 61 but in section 53 itself, treating the two provisions as directed at different objects - the one at the duplication of similar statutory benefits, the other at the recovery of compensation or damages in respect of an employment injury. The Indian statute thus exhibits, in contemporaneous coexistence, precisely the division of labour which, at paragraph [36] above, I have held sections 31 and 42 to have performed; and it confirms that a provision of the section 42 family neither founds nor fortifies the bar upon the action for damages, whose source lies in the section 31 family alone. [54] The Indian authorities are the nearest comparative guide, because section 31 was modelled upon the Indian provision; and it is instructive to notice, if only in outline and again by way of observation forming no part of the decision, where section 31 stands within the broader Commonwealth pattern. That pattern is a settled one. Workers' compensation legislation across the Commonwealth embodies a common legislative compromise: the employee receives an assured entitlement to no-fault compensation, and the employer, whose contributions fund the scheme, receives in exchange immunity from civil suit within the scope of the scheme. The Canadian provincial statutes, of which the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Act 1997 is representative, impose an exclusive-remedy bar of precisely that character, foreclosing civil actions against employers covered by the scheme while preserving claims against third parties outside its protection. The Australian States proceed upon the same foundation, though with a measured relaxation: the legislation of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland - the Workplace Injury Management and Workers Compensation Act 1998, the Workplace Injury Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 2013 and the Workers' Compensation and Rehabilitation Act 2003 respectively - establishes the statutory scheme as the primary avenue of recovery while preserving limited common law actions, but only for serious injury or where prescribed statutory thresholds are satisfied. New Zealand has carried the principle furthest: under the Accident Compensation Act 2001, personal injury claims in tort are almost entirely abolished and replaced by statutory compensation, subject only to narrow exceptions, of which the principal is a claim for exemplary damages - an exception which, it is to be noted, exists because the legislature expressly created it. The United Kingdom alone stands outside the pattern: having no exclusive-remedy provision, it permits statutory social security benefits and the common law action in negligence to run in parallel. That divergence is itself instructive, for it demonstrates that a parallel model was always available to the Malaysian Parliament had it wished to adopt one. Section 31 is the proof that it did not. [55] The conclusion of present relevance which the survey yields upon this limb is this. Section 31 conforms to the dominant Commonwealth model, under which statutory compensation is substituted for the common law action against the employer; and of the schemes surveyed it stands closest to its Indian parent, at the absolute end of the spectrum. The comparative exercise therefore lends no support to a reading that would treat the bar as partial, provisional or conditional upon election. I take from these materials no more than they can properly bear. The foreign decisions construe statutes that differ from ours, and the foreign schemes differ materially in statutory design; none is a substitute for the binding Malaysian authority that governs this case. But where the apex courts of two jurisdictions, construing exclusive-remedy provisions of common parentage, have each held that the statutory insurance scheme displaces the employee's common law action against the employer, and have each rejected the arguments from legislative history and beneficent construction now pressed upon me, the convergence is not to be put aside, though I emphasise once more that it fortifies and does not found. A second conclusion which the survey yields bears upon the second limb, and I return to it at paragraphs [69] and [70] below. The Determination on the First Limb [56] Drawing together the materials examined upon this limb—the words of section 31, read in their plain and ordinary meaning and within the scheme of Act 4 as a whole; the binding constructions of the Federal Court in Tan Peng Loh (supra), Sambu Pernas Construction (supra) and Che Noh bin Yacob (supra); the legislative history, which discloses a prohibition progressively widened and never relaxed; the external aids, which confirm from the parliamentary record itself that the deletion of section 42 was directed at the duplication of similar statutory benefits and not at the restoration of the common law action; and the persuasive and comparative materials, which show the conclusion independently reached under Malaysian law to be consonant with the treatment of exclusive-remedy provisions of common parentage elsewhere - I answer the first limb of the question in the affirmative. Section 31 of Act 4 bars the Plaintiffs' claims against the Defendant under sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956. Each of the contrary contentions - the distinction between injury and death, the reliance upon section 28A of the Civil Law Act 1956, the supersession argument built upon the repeal of section 42, the appeal to liberal and purposive construction including the maximum-protection approach in PJD Regency (supra), the argument founded upon the Defendant's prosecution under the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994, and the constitutional contention under Article 5(1) of the Federal Constitution—has been examined and rejected for the reasons given. The Second Limb: Whether the Bar Extends to Aggravated and Exemplary Damages The Rival Positions on the Second Limb [57] The rival positions on this limb may be shortly stated. The Defendant contends that the bar, extinguishing the cause of action itself, necessarily carries with it every head of damages, aggravated and exemplary included. The Plaintiffs rely principally upon Rajendiran Manickam (supra), in which the Court of Appeal declined to strike out a materially similar claim, observing that whether section 31 was designed to bar a claim for aggravated and exemplary damages had not been argued or considered in the Federal Court cases, and that in a social piece of legislation any ambiguity ought to be resolved in favour of the injured employee; upon Rashidah binti Abd Ghani v SJ Classic Industries Sdn Bhd [2020] 1 LNS 1998 and Chuah Kum Chai (supra), in which the courts followed Rajendiran Manickam (supra) in declining to strike out materially similar claims; and upon the punitive and deterrent function of exemplary damages, which is said to stand independent of any concern with double recovery and therefore to survive the bar. Ramli Samad (supra) is sought to be put aside as having concerned recovery from a third-party insurer under section 96(1) of the Road Transport Act 1987 following a judgment obtained against a co-employee - a wholly different statutory scheme from a direct action against the employer - and as having raised no question whether section 31 reaches aggravated and exemplary damages. The Defendant advances, in the alternative and independently of section 31, further grounds said to defeat the punitive heads in any event: that exemplary damages are excluded in an estate claim by section 8(2)(a) of the Civil Law Act 1956, and that aggravated damages, being in the nature of special damages, must be specifically pleaded and particularised, which the Defendant says has not been done. Those grounds, and the Plaintiffs' objection that they travel beyond the question reserved, are considered separately at paragraphs [74] to [77] below. The True Reach of Rajendiran Manickam [58] The second limb is the substantial question, and it is the question upon which Rajendiran Manickam (supra) casts its shadow. It is necessary to examine that decision with care, both to give it its proper weight and to identify with precision what it did and did not decide. [59] Rajendiran Manickam (supra) was an appeal against the striking out of a claim under Order 18 rule 19 of the Rules of Court 2012. The Court of Appeal, speaking through His Lordship Lee Swee Seng JCA (as His Lordship then was, and now a Judge of the Federal Court), allowed the appeal and restored the action to trial. The reasoning that bears upon the present question is contained principally in paragraphs [16] to [19] and [41] to [43]. At paragraph [7], the Court of Appeal recorded the position as explained by the Federal Court - that section 31 prohibits any further claim against the employer whether under statute or at common law - and recounted that it was on that footing that the suit had been struck out below as "a complete non-starter and doomed to fail". That passage is a recital of the settled position and of the decision under appeal; it is not the Court of Appeal's own conclusion upon the suit before it, which it proceeded to restore to trial. What matters for present purposes is that the Court of Appeal nowhere questioned the Federal Court's construction of section 31 so far as compensatory claims against the employer are concerned. What the Court of Appeal was not prepared to do, on a striking-out application, was to hold it plain and obvious that the bar extended to a claim for aggravated and exemplary damages founded on the employer's alleged gross negligence. It observed, at paragraphs [18] and [19], that the Socso Act is a social piece of legislation, that there is "no rhyme nor reason" why an employer contributing to the scheme should be immunised against all claims for aggravated and exemplary damages even where grossly negligent, and that the argument that section 31 bars only general and special damages while leaving aggravated and exemplary damages untouched had not been argued and considered in the Federal Court cases. It is essential to be clear about the status of those observations. Rajendiran Manickam (supra) decided that the claim before it was not suitable for summary termination and should proceed to trial. That is its ratio: at paragraph [42] the Court of Appeal held that this was "not a plain and obvious case" for striking out, and at paragraph [43] it sent the matter back to the Sessions Court for trial. The observations about the possible reach of section 31 into the field of aggravated and exemplary damages were made in explanation of why the question was fit to be tried - that is, why it was arguable - and not in resolution of it. The Court of Appeal did not decide that section 31 leaves a residual common law claim for exemplary damages intact; it decided that whether it does so was a question that ought not to be foreclosed at the threshold. The distinction is fundamental. An appellate observation that a question is open and deserves argument is not a decision of that question, and it does not bind a court which, in a procedural setting that requires the question to be answered, comes to answer it. To put the matter beyond doubt: Rajendiran Manickam (supra) did not hold that aggravated or exemplary damages are recoverable against an employer protected by section 31. It held only that, the point not having been argued or considered in the Federal Court, the claim ought not to be struck out summarily as plainly unsustainable. That is a procedural holding upon the suitability of the claim for summary disposal under Order 18 rule 19; it is not a determination of the substantive law, and it leaves the construction of section 31 open for decision by a court that is required to decide it. The Plaintiffs are therefore right in what they say Rajendiran Manickam (supra) acknowledges, and wrong in the use they make of it. The acknowledgment is that the true scope of the bar in relation to the punitive heads was not argued or considered in the Federal Court cases. The use made of it is that this Court should therefore leave the question undetermined. But the premise establishes the opposite of the conclusion. A question which has not been decided is a question awaiting decision; and where, as here, its decision is dispositive and the facts on which it turns are admitted, the Court's duty is to decide it. [61] There is, moreover, a matter of judicial hierarchy that is decisive of the weight to be given to the competing authorities, and which I should state plainly. The construction of section 31 was settled by the Federal Court in Tan Peng Loh (supra), Sambu Pernas Construction (supra) and Che Noh bin Yacob (supra). Those decisions bind this Court absolutely. Even on the most favourable reading the Plaintiffs could urge of Rajendiran Manickam (supra), it is a decision of the Court of Appeal, which neither overruled nor could overrule the Federal Court, and which did not purport to do so; on the contrary, it recited without question, at paragraph [7], the settled position that section 31 prohibits any further claim against the employer, and confined its concern to the punitive heads, which it considered the Federal Court had not addressed. A High Court confronted with a settled Federal Court construction on the one hand, and a later observation of the Court of Appeal that the point is arguable on the other, is not at liberty to prefer the latter. It is bound by the former. The doctrine of binding precedent thus reinforces, as a matter of obligation and not merely of persuasion, the conclusion already reached on the language: this Court must give effect to the construction the Federal Court has placed upon section 31, and that construction bars the claim. [62] That is the position in which this Court stands. Unlike the Court of Appeal in Rajendiran Manickam (supra), this Court is not asked whether the point is arguable; it is asked, under Order 14A, to decide it. The very feature that led the Court of Appeal to send the matter to trial—that the construction of section 31 in its application to punitive damages is a question of some difficulty which had not been the subject of direct decision—is, under Order 14A, no reason to decline the question but the occasion for answering it. The Plaintiffs' reliance upon Rashidah binti Abd Ghani (supra) and Chuah Kum Chai (supra), which followed Rajendiran Manickam (supra) in declining summary termination, does not alter the position, for those were decisions upon the arguability of the claim and not upon the construction of the section, and the very argument they held fit to be tried is the argument now fully before me and requiring an answer. Nor does the circumstance that the present case concerns a death rather than a mere injury enlarge the arguability those decisions recognised; it does not touch the construction of section 31, which turns upon the words of the section and not upon the gravity of the injury. I therefore turn to the construction itself. The Construction of "Any Compensation or Damages" [63] I approach this limb conscious that it was acknowledged, on the defence side, that upon a reading of Rajendiran Manickam (supra) the bar might appear not to reach the punitive heads. An acknowledgment of that kind, touching a pure question of law, neither binds the Court nor relieves it of the duty to construe the section for itself; and, for the reasons that follow, the appearance does not survive scrutiny. I approach it, further, with the candour it requires: the point has not been the subject of direct decision by the Federal Court, and to that extent the question is, at the level of decision, one of first impression. The answer I give rests upon two independent grounds - first, the words of the section, which in terms reach "any ... damages" whatever the function of the damages claimed; and secondly, the structure of the law, under which the punitive heads cannot survive the extinction of the cause of action that alone could carry them. Each ground suffices; and the conclusion is the Court's own construction, compelled by the language and consistent with, though not expressly dictated by, the Federal Court authorities. The words of section 31 are "any compensation or damages under any other law". The phrase "any ... damages" is, on its ordinary meaning, comprehensive. It does not distinguish between heads of damages. It does not say "general and special damages" to the exclusion of aggravated or exemplary damages. Where Parliament has used a word of the widest import - "any"- qualifying "damages" without limitation, the Court is not at liberty to read in a limitation that the words do not contain. The point made earlier on the first limb bears directly here: in Tan Peng Loh (supra) the Federal Court read section 31 with strict fidelity to its terms, holding the bar to reach exactly as far as the words go and no further. A section read in that way cannot be made to carry an unexpressed exception for punitive heads of damages. The suggestion in Rajendiran Manickam (supra) that the bar might be confined to general and special damages finds no foothold in the language; it would require the Court to insert into the section a distinction between heads of damages that Parliament did not draw. To accept it would be to supply a casus omissus, which is no part of the judicial office: where the legislature has used a single comprehensive word and has itself drawn no distinction, the court does not draw one for it. The same canons that govern the construction of "any other law" on the first limb apply with equal force here. To read the words as barring some heads of damages but not others would be to read into the section a qualification that Parliament has not expressed, contrary to the settled principle that the court interprets the words the legislature has used and does not supply those it has omitted. Two further considerations of construction place the matter beyond doubt. The first is the principle that general words receive their full and natural amplitude unless the context requires restraint. Nothing in the context of section 31 restrains the word "any"; and the scheme of the Act, for the reasons given at paragraph [33] above, enlarges rather than confines it. The second is the incongruity which the contrary reading would produce, and a construction productive of incongruity within a statute is to be avoided where the words permit a coherent one. Upon the reading urged, the bar would hold firm against the claim of an employee injured through simple inadvertence, yet yield precisely where the employer's conduct is alleged to be at its worst, so that the graver the fault the weaker the prohibition. A no-fault scheme, whose defining feature is that it excludes the quality of the employer's conduct from the criterion of recovery, cannot rationally be construed so that the quality of that conduct determines the reach of its central prohibition. The anomaly is not Parliament's; it belongs entirely to the construction contended for, and it condemns it. One further way of putting the contrary case must be confronted. It might be said that the very observation in Rajendiran Manickam (supra)- that the reach of section 31 into the punitive heads had not been argued or considered in the Federal Court—itself shows the section to be unclear upon the point, and thereby opens the door to the aids of construction, historical and liberal, which operate only upon ambiguity. The submission mistakes the nature of ambiguity. A provision is ambiguous when its words are reasonably capable of bearing more than one meaning; it is not made ambiguous by the circumstance that a particular application of its plain words was not previously debated. The words "any compensation or damages" either comprehend the punitive heads or they do not, and for the reasons given they do. That no earlier court was asked the question does not render the answer doubtful; it merely left the question to be asked. Silence in the authorities is an absence of decision, not a presence of ambiguity, and it cannot supply the foothold which the language itself denies. The Structural Answer: Heads of Relief Parasitic Upon the Cause of Action [64] There is, moreover, a more fundamental answer, which goes to the structure of the law rather than to the bare width of the words. Aggravated and exemplary damages are not freestanding causes of action. They are heads of relief parasitic upon a subsisting cause of action: aggravated damages compensate for injury aggravated by the manner of its infliction, and exemplary damages—awarded in the limited categories discussed by the Court of Appeal in Datuk Seri Khalid Abu Bakar & Ors v N Indra P Nallathamby & Another Appeal [2014] 6 MLRA 489, cited in Rajendiran Manickam (supra) at paragraphs [20] and [21] - are awarded to punish and deter reprehensible conduct attending the commission of a tort. Neither can be awarded in the air. Each requires an underlying tort upon which to fasten. Put plainly: aggravated and exemplary damages are not separate claims that may be brought on their own. They are additional sums that a court may add within a claim that already exists. If the claim itself cannot be brought - because section 31 forbids it there is nothing to which those additional sums can attach. It follows that, once section 31 has extinguished the underlying cause of action against the employer - as Tan Peng Loh (supra) holds that it does—there is nothing left to which a claim for aggravated or exemplary damages can attach. The bar does not operate by enumerating heads of damages and exempting some; it operates at the level of the cause of action, and in extinguishing the cause of action it necessarily defeats every head of relief that depends upon it. A prohibition upon recovering "any ... damages under any other law" from the employer necessarily encompasses a claim that seeks aggravated or exemplary damages, for such a claim is a common law claim and nothing else. This, in my respectful view, is the complete answer to the question posed in Rajendiran Manickam (supra) at paragraph [19]. The point was not separately argued in the Federal Court, and I do not treat those cases as themselves deciding it; what they decide is that section 31 extinguishes the cause of action against the employer, and once that is accepted the answer to the present question follows as a matter of construction and of the ordinary law of remedies. To bar the cause of action is, of necessity, to bar every species of damages claimed upon it. That conclusion sits comfortably with the authorities already discussed. Che Noh bin Yacob (supra) describes the section as a complete bar to any claim against the employer at common law, and Sambu Pernas Construction (supra) confirms that a claimant deriving his right through the deceased can have no greater right of action than the deceased possessed. Where the cause of action against the employer has itself been extinguished, there is simply no foundation upon which a claim for aggravated or exemplary damages - which are forms of relief and not independent rights - could be built. The Plaintiffs' answer, that the punitive and deterrent function of exemplary damages stands independent of any concern with double recovery and ought therefore to survive the bar, is an argument directed to the purpose that such damages serve and not to the words of section 31. Whatever the purpose of the relief, it can be pursued only within an action against the employer, and it is precisely that action which section 31 forbids. A head of relief cannot outlive the cause of action that alone could carry it. The Double-Recovery Reading and Ramli Samad [66] The alternative reading floated in Rajendiran Manickam (supra) at paragraph [17]—that section 31 was directed only at preventing double recovery, so that a plaintiff might keep, as additional damages under the common law, the excess over what the no-fault scheme pays—does not, with respect, accord with the language or with the binding construction. The same reading, drawn now from PJD Regency (supra) and urged as the "true construction" of the section as it presently stands, must be rejected for the same reason. Section 31 is not framed as a rule against double recovery; a rule against double recovery would permit the action to proceed and would adjust the award by setting off benefits received, which is the office of provisions such as section 28A, not of section 31. Section 31 is framed as a prohibition upon entitlement: the insured person and his dependants "shall not be entitled to receive or recover". It removes the right to recover, not merely the right to retain in excess. The double-recovery rationale, whatever its policy attractions, cannot be reconciled with words that operate upon entitlement rather than upon quantum. That the section operates upon entitlement, and not merely upon the retention of sums in excess of the scheme's benefits, is put beyond doubt by Ramli Samad (supra), where the Court of Appeal, per James Foong JCA, held that an insured person barred by section 31 cannot receive or recover from the employer even upon a judgment obtained, the prohibition reaching so far as to defeat recovery against the employer's insurer, who stands in the employer's shoes. A provision framed in those terms is not a rule against double recovery but a denial of the right to recover at all. [67] The Plaintiffs seek to put Ramli Samad (supra) aside on the ground that it concerned recovery from a third-party insurer under section 96(1) of the Road Transport Act 1987 following a judgment obtained against a co-employee, a statutory scheme wholly different from a direct action against the employer, and that the question whether section 31 reaches aggravated and exemplary damages did not arise in it. The description of the case is accurate, and I accept it. I do not rely upon Ramli Samad (supra) as deciding the second limb; it did not. But the distinction does not touch the proposition for which the decision is here invoked, which is that section 31 operates upon entitlement and not upon quantum—that it forbids the insured person to receive or recover, and forbids it with such force that even a judgment already obtained yields him nothing. That proposition was necessary to the decision and is unaffected by the identity of the party from whom recovery was sought. An authority may be distinguishable on its facts and yet remain authoritative upon the principle for which it is cited. It is the latter which matters here. The Persuasive Authority of the Indian Decisions [68] The reasoning of the Supreme Court of India in Trehan (supra), noticed at paragraphs [52] and [53] above, was carried forward, and to the very point that arises on the second limb, in Western India Plywood Ltd v Shri. P. Ashoka (1997) (7) SCC 638. I record it, once more, by way of observation only and forming no part of the grounds of decision. The appeal there arose from the very Full Bench decision of the Kerala High Court whose reasoning had been disapproved in Trehan (supra). An insured employee whose hand had been amputated in a factory accident, and who had received disablement benefit under the Indian Act, sought leave to sue his employer in tort for damages. The Supreme Court, per Kirpal J, applying Trehan (supra), held the claim barred and set aside the decision of the Kerala High Court. Its reasoning was that the bar was not confined to relief claimed under another statute but reached a claim founded in the law of tort; even though the Act was beneficial legislation, the legislature had thought it fit to prohibit an insured person from recovering compensation or damages "under any other law, including Torts", in respect of an employment injury. In terms, the Court held that section 53 "disentitles an employee who has suffered an employment injury" from receiving compensation or damages under the Workmen's Compensation Act "or any other law for the time being in force or otherwise". The Court approved the view that the object of the provision was to save the employer from facing more than one claim arising from the same accident. The textual route by which the Indian Court reached the common law was the words "or otherwise", which section 31 does not contain; but the destination is the same as that reached by the Federal Court in Tan Peng Loh (supra) through the definition of "law" in Article 160(2) of the Federal Constitution. By either route the bar reaches a claim in tort, and it does so because it operates upon the cause of action itself. That is the proposition upon which my answer to the second limb rests: a bar that extinguishes the common law action against the employer necessarily defeats every head of damages-general, special, aggravated or exemplary-that could be claimed upon it. It is instructive, finally, that the Supreme Court expressly left open whether the bar would defeat a claim against a person who was not the employer, just as the Federal Court in Tan Peng Loh (supra) spared the co-employee whom the section did not name. That reservation confirms, rather than qualifies, the completeness of the bar against the employer, who alone is sued in this action. The Comparative Legislation of the Commonwealth [69] Within the Commonwealth pattern outlined at paragraph [54] above, Singapore merits particular attention, both because its scheme is the most recent restatement among the neighbouring jurisdictions and because section 63 of the Work Injury Compensation Act 2019, the full text of which the Court has examined, exemplifies with unusual clarity the opposite drafting technique to that of section 31. The Singapore Act does not extinguish the employee's action for damages against the employer; it regulates the relationship between the statutory claim and the common law action through a structured regime of election. By section 63(1), the statutory right to compensation is lost where an action for damages in respect of the injury has been instituted against the employer or damages have been recovered from him. Conversely, by section 63(2), the action for damages is barred only upon the occurrence of defined events—among them, where an order gives effect to a settlement agreement in respect of compensation under the Act, where a notice of computation or a notice of assessment has taken effect as an order of compensation, or where the employee fails to withdraw his statutory claim within 28 days after the date of service of such a notice. Section 63(3) restores the right of action in defined circumstances following an adverse review by the Commissioner, and section 63(5) preserves it outright where an order refusing compensation has been made or where it has been determined that the injury did not arise out of and in the course of the employment or that the claimant is not an employee within the meaning of the Act. Section 63(6) completes the machinery: an employee who sues at common law within one year after the accident and fails, in circumstances where the employer would nonetheless have been liable to pay compensation under the Act, has his action dismissed, but may elect to have the statutory compensation assessed by the very court that dismissed it, subject to a deduction of costs occasioned by his choice of forum. The elaboration is the point. Where a legislature intends the statutory scheme and the common law action to coexist, that coexistence is not left to implication; it demands machinery - elections, notices, time limits and safeguards against double recovery - and the Singapore Parliament has supplied all of it in express terms. Section 31 contains nothing of the kind. [70] The second conclusion which the comparative survey yields accordingly bears upon this limb, and it is the more pointed. The survey demonstrates how legislatures speak when they intend anything to survive the displacement of the common law action. Where a residual action is preserved by election, the statute says so and supplies the machinery, as section 63 of the Singapore Act does; where it is preserved for serious injury, the statute prescribes the thresholds, as the Australian Acts do; and where, under the most comprehensive no-fault scheme in the common law world, exemplary damages alone are permitted to survive, their survival is the work of express statutory exception, as under the New Zealand Act. It is right to notice the reading of the New Zealand position that cuts the other way: the preservation there enacted shows that a mature no-fault scheme sees no incoherence in the survival of exemplary damages, and a critic may add that a survey of this kind proves drafting practice, not Malaysian meaning. Both points are accepted, and neither carries the matter further. That coexistence is coherent where it is enacted says nothing about whether Parliament has enacted it here; and drafting practice is invoked not to fix the meaning of section 31 but to test the plausibility of reading into it a preservation it nowhere expresses. On either view the question returns to the Malaysian text, and the Malaysian text contains none. Section 31 employs none of these devices. It enacts no election, prescribes no threshold, and saves no head of damages; its single concession is the motor-vehicle proviso, whose significance has already been examined. Against that background, the suggestion that section 31 silently preserves a residual claim for aggravated and exemplary damages is not merely unsupported by its words; it runs counter to the uniform legislative practice of each of the jurisdictions surveyed. Where preservation is intended, it is enacted. It is nowhere left to implication. The grounds of decision are Malaysian; the survey merely confirms that section 31, upon its plain words, upon the binding construction of the Federal Court, and in its place within the Commonwealth pattern of exclusive-remedy legislation, bars the Plaintiffs' claims in their entirety. The Policy Concern and the Limits of the Judicial Function [71] I would not wish to be understood as denying the force of what troubled the Court of Appeal in Rajendiran Manickam (supra). There is a real question of policy in whether an employer guilty of gross negligence ought to be wholly immune from the punitive and deterrent function that exemplary damages serve, when the price of that immunity is a no-fault contribution that may be modest in relation to the gravity of the wrong. The observations at paragraphs [18], [25] and [26] of Rajendiran Manickam (supra) give that concern eloquent expression, and I do not underestimate it. The present case, on the Plaintiffs' pleaded account of it, presents that concern in an acute form: a young man dead at his work, and an employer convicted and fined under the safety legislation. I do not shrink from saying that the result to which the statute drives me is a hard one. But it is a question for Parliament, or for the Federal Court in its capacity to develop the law; it is not a question that the clear words of section 31, as construed by binding authority, leave open to a court of first instance. If the bar is to be re-drawn to admit a residual claim for exemplary damages against a grossly negligent employer, it must be re-drawn by the legislature or by the apex court, and not by a strained reading of words that the Federal Court has read with strict fidelity to their terms. That this is the proper allocation of responsibility is, I note, consistent with the observation in Rajendiran Manickam (supra) itself, at paragraph [26], that the law should be given space to develop "after the two Federal Court cases"—a recognition that any such development must come from the institutions competent to effect it. The comparative material noticed above - by way of observation only, and forming no part of the grounds of this decision - makes the same point from the opposite direction: where the New Zealand Parliament intended exemplary damages to survive even the most comprehensive no-fault compensation scheme in the common law world, it preserved them by express enactment. If a like preservation is thought desirable under Act 4, the precedent lies ready to hand; but it is for Parliament to enact it, not for this Court to imply it. The hardness of the individual result must, moreover, be weighed against the considerations developed at paragraph [45] above: the integrity of a collective, no-fault scheme is itself a form of protection, and protection of the very class to which the deceased belonged. [72] There is, finally, a further and independent answer to the second limb which holds even on the contrary hypothesis, and which I state in the alternative lest the foregoing be thought to turn solely upon the extinction of the cause of action. Assume, contrary to my conclusion, that section 31 left some residual claim against the employer upon which a head of damages might fasten. Even then, exemplary damages would not be available on a footing such as the present. As the Court of Appeal explained in Datuk Seri Khalid Abu Bakar & Ors v N Indra P Nallathamby & Another Appeal (supra), exemplary damages are confined to settled and exceptional categories, and are not awarded for negligence, however serious, that does not fall within them. The Court of Appeal in Rajendiran Manickam (supra) itself drew upon those categories in declining to strike the claim out at the threshold. An employer's alleged failure to maintain a safe system of work, even if established at trial and even if properly characterised as gross negligence, would remain to be brought, by evidence and argument, within the recognised categories to which the exemplary jurisdiction is confined; and nothing in these Grounds decides whether it could be. I do not rest my decision upon this ground, for the contested allegations of negligence are not before me on this Order 14A determination and I make no finding upon them; I record the point only so that it is not thought to have been overlooked; it decides nothing, and the answer I give to the second limb neither needs nor receives any support from it. I emphasise, lest there be any doubt, that this paragraph is by way of observation only; it answers no part of the question reserved, and the answer I give to the second limb rests upon the construction of section 31 alone. The Determination on the Second Limb [73] therefore answer the second limb of the question in the affirmative. The bar in section 31 extends to the claims for aggravated and exemplary damages. That answer is complete in itself, and it is the whole of the answer: it rests upon two independent grounds - the comprehensive words "any compensation or damages", which admit of no distinction between heads of damages, and the structure of the law, under which the punitive heads cannot outlive the cause of action that section 31 has extinguished - and upon nothing else. It is consonant, though this is recorded by way of observation only, with the construction placed upon the cognate provision in Western India Plywood (supra) and with the uniform legislative practice of the Commonwealth, under which any survival of a head of damages beyond an exclusive-remedy bar is the work of express enactment and never of implication. The observations recorded at paragraphs [74] to [77] below upon section 8(2)(a) of the Civil Law Act 1956, upon the sufficiency of the pleaded particulars and upon the absence of letters of administration form no part of it. The Matters Raised Beyond the Ambit of the Question Reserved [74] There remain the grounds upon which the Defendant contends that the punitive heads must fail independently of section 31, and the Plaintiffs' answer that those grounds fall outside the question this Court has framed. On the latter point the Plaintiffs are, in substance, correct, and I say so at once. The question reserved is confined to two limbs: whether section 31 bars the claims under sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956, and whether the bar extends to the claims for aggravated and exemplary damages. It does not extend to the sufficiency of the particulars pleaded, nor to the capacity in which an estate claim might be maintained. Those are not pure questions of law arising upon admitted facts; they are matters of pleading and of proof, and Order 14A is not the vehicle for their determination. I therefore approach them accordingly, distinguishing between the one such ground which is a pure question of law upon the pleaded claim and those which are not. [75] Section 8(2)(a) of the Civil Law Act 1956 stands in a different position from the matters considered in the two paragraphs that follow, for it raises a pure question of law upon the face of the pleaded claim; but it, too, lies outside the question reserved, which is confined to the reach of section 31, and I therefore deal with it by way of observation and not as a ground of decision. It provides that the damages recoverable for the benefit of the estate of a deceased person shall not include any exemplary damages. The Plaintiffs accept that this excludes exemplary damages in an estate claim, but contend that the exclusion, being confined in terms to damages recoverable "for the benefit of the estate", has no application to the independent dependency claim under section 7. I note, and give effect to, the concession that this submission contains: the Plaintiffs do not contend that exemplary damages may be recovered for the benefit of the estate under section 8, and rightly not, for section 8(2)(a) excludes them in terms. So far as the words of the sub-section go, that contention is correct, and I accept it. It follows that the position must be stated more precisely than it was put to me by the Defendant. Section 8(2)(a) would, had the point arisen for decision, have afforded a complete and independent answer to the claim for exemplary damages in so far as that claim is advanced on behalf of the estate under section 8. But the point does not arise for decision upon the question reserved, and I do not decide it; the estate claim, like every other part of the action, falls with the cause of action that section 31 extinguishes, and it is upon that ground, and that ground alone, that it fails. It is no answer to a claim for exemplary damages advanced by the Plaintiffs in their own right as dependants under section 7. But that claim requires no separate answer, for it does not survive the first limb: section 31 having barred the action under section 7 against this Defendant, there is no subsisting cause of action to which any head of damages, punitive or compensatory, can attach. [76] The contention founded upon Bukit Tinggi Hospital Sdn Bhd & Anor v Navin Sharma Karam Chand & Anor and Another Appeal [2026] 1 MLRA 409 stands on a different footing. The principle for which the case is cited is not in doubt. Aggravated damages, being in the nature of aggravated compensation for injury to feelings and dignity occasioned by the manner of the wrong, partake of the character of special damages and must be specifically pleaded and particularised; and the Court of Appeal, adopting the reasoning of the Singapore Court of Appeal in Noor Azlin bt Abdul Rahman v Changi General Hospital [2022] 1 SLR 689, held that a failure to plead and particularise the facts said to warrant such an award may be fatal to the claim. But whether the particulars pleaded in a given statement of claim are sufficient to support the head is a question of pleading and of degree. It is not a pure question of law arising upon admitted facts, and it does not fall within the question reserved. The Plaintiffs are right so to submit, and I decline to determine it. I record, without deciding, that paragraphs 5, 8, 9, 10 and 11 of the Statement of Claim contain particulars of the negligence alleged, including the failure to provide a safe system of work and the manner in which the strapping belt is said to have been secured, and that if the Defendant considered those particulars insufficient to support the punitive heads, the ordinary course would have been an application for further and better particulars under Order 18 rule 12 of the Rules of Court 2012, or a demand that the pleading be amended, rather than the summary extinction of the head. Nothing in this paragraph qualifies the answer I give to the second limb, which rests upon the construction of section 31 and upon that alone. [77] The same is true of the point taken upon the absence of letters of administration. The capacity in which a claim under section 8 may be maintained is not among the matters admitted, and it does not arise upon the question framed. I note only, and again without deciding, that the Plaintiffs' claim under section 7 is brought in their own right as parents and dependants of the deceased and does not, on the face of it, depend upon a grant of representation, whereas a claim for the benefit of the estate under section 8 stands differently. To the same effect are the observations in Bukit Tinggi Hospital (supra), following Noor Azlin (supra), that an award of aggravated damages in an estate claim is confined to injury to feelings actually perceived by the deceased while living and sentient, the members of the family being, in law, secondary victims. None of this is a ground of my decision, and I put it no higher than as an observation upon contentions which, though argued, lie outside the question I am required to answer. CONCLUSION [78] Drawing the threads together, I answer the question reserved as follows. On the first limb: it being admitted that the deceased was an insured person and that his death was an employment injury within the meaning of Act 4, section 31 of that Act bars the Plaintiffs' claims against the Defendant under sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956. The Federal Court authority establishing that bar is not displaced by the repeal of section 42 or by the amendments to section 31, for the operative words construed by that authority remain in force and the post-1997 text reinforces rather than weakens the prohibition. On the second limb: the bar so created extends to the claims for aggravated and exemplary damages, because those are heads of relief parasitic upon a cause of action that section 31 has extinguished. Those answers are consonant, moreover - though this is recorded by way of observation only, upon materials examined in the Court's own research and forming no part of the grounds of decision - with the construction placed upon the cognate Indian provision by the Supreme Court of India, and with the wider Commonwealth pattern of exclusive-remedy legislation noticed above, under which any residual common law recovery, where it is intended, is preserved by express enactment and never by implication. The remaining contentions advanced by the Plaintiffs - the constitutional argument under Article 5(1), the reliance upon the Defendant's prosecution under the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994, and the appeal to purposive and liberal construction, including the maximum-protection approach expounded in PJD Regency (supra) - are rejected for the reasons already given. The matters lying beyond the two limbs - the operation of section 8(2)(a) of the Civil Law Act 1956 upon the estate claim, the sufficiency of the pleaded particulars, and the absence of letters of administration - have been noticed but not determined, for they fall outside the question reserved; my answers do not rest upon them, and nothing in these Grounds decides them. For the avoidance of doubt, the answers I give to both limbs rest upon the construction of section 31 and upon the facts admitted on the pleadings; they depend upon no contested allegation of fact, and upon no matter lying outside the two limbs of the question reserved. [79] It follows that the action cannot proceed. The determination of the question disposes of the whole of the Plaintiffs' claim against the Defendant. It remains to give effect to that determination by the appropriate orders, which I now make. DISPOSAL, COSTS AND ORDERS [80] The power to dispose of the action upon this determination is expressly conferred. Order 14A rule 1(2) of the Rules of Court 2012 provides that, on the determination of a question under that Order, the Court may dismiss the cause or matter or make such order or judgment as it thinks just. The determination I have made answers both limbs of the reserved question against the Plaintiffs: section 31 of Act 4 bars the whole of the claim brought under sections 7 and 8 of the Civil Law Act 1956, and no head of relief survives the bar. There is, in consequence, no cause of action upon which the suit could be tried and no purpose that a trial could serve. This is therefore a case in which the determination finally determines the entire cause or matter within the meaning of rule 1(1)(b), and the just order under rule 1(2) is that the action be dismissed. [81] I have not lost sight of the fact that the question was one which this Court raised of its own motion, and that its determination brings the action of a bereaved family to an end without a trial. Two matters answer any disquiet on that account. The first is that Order 14A exists precisely so that an action whose outcome turns upon the construction of a statute, and not upon contested evidence, is not driven through a trial that could not alter the result. The second is that the Plaintiffs are not left without recourse: the very scheme that bars this action is the scheme that secures dependants' benefits, without proof of fault, to those who qualify under the Act; the Plaintiffs have lodged their claim, and their entitlement is a matter for the Social Security Organisation to determine according to the Act. The dismissal of the suit withdraws only the common law remedy that Parliament has, by section 31, withheld; it leaves untouched the statutory entitlement that Parliament has, by the same Act, conferred. The statutory protection so secured is not a consolation prize. For the reasons developed at paragraphs [33] and [45] above, it is the assured, no-fault protection which Parliament judged, for the generality of working families, to be worth more than the uncertain prospect of an action in negligence; and the order I make does no more than hold the parties to the statutory settlement by which that protection is secured. [82] As to costs, the discretion conferred by Order 59 is a wide one. Rule 3(2) directs that costs ordinarily follow the event, but it preserves to the Court the power to make some other order where the circumstances of the case require, and this is such a case. The determination was made not upon any application by the Defendant but upon a question the Court framed of its own motion; and the point was one of genuine difficulty, novelty and general importance, upon which the Court of Appeal had itself observed that argument was warranted. Where the Court has of its own motion raised and determined a question of that character, it is just that neither party should bear the other's costs of a determination that neither sought. Weighing these considerations, I am satisfied that the just order is that there be no order as to costs, each party bearing its own costs of the action and of the determination. [83] I accordingly order as follows:

the question of law reserved for determination under Order 14A rule 1, as framed in the ruling of 29.06.2026, is answered in the affirmative upon both limbs;

upon that determination, and pursuant to Order 14A rule 1(2) of the Rules of Court 2012, the Plaintiffs' action against the Defendant is dismissed;

the trial dates vacated by the ruling of 29.06.2026 are discharged, and the directions given for the conduct of the trial are spent;

there be no order as to costs; and

there be liberty to apply, confined strictly to the working out of the terms of these orders. A FINAL WORD [84] I do not part with this case without a word addressed to the Plaintiffs themselves. Their son, Muhammad Umar bin Mohd Shahid, was twenty-two years of age. He was an operator, engaged a little over three months before his death, and on 09.02.2022 he was at his work, loading pallets of glass into a container at the Defendant's premises, when he sustained the injuries which the death certificate records as consistent with impact by a heavy object. He did not survive that day. Those are the facts from which this action began, and there is no order this Court can make which will alter them. His parents have had to come to a court of law to ask what the law would do about the death of their child, and the answer they have received is not the answer they sought. No judgment of law can answer a loss of that nature, and nothing in these Grounds should be understood as making light of it. Their grief is not in doubt, and the claim they brought was neither frivolous nor opportunistic: the questions it raised were of genuine difficulty and of general importance, and they have received the full and anxious consideration to which they were entitled. It is right to be plain about what has entered into the answer and what has not. This Court does not suppose that reasons, however fully expressed, will be of comfort to the Plaintiffs. A court nevertheless owes to the party who has lost an account of why, and it is owed plainly and without evasion. The question reserved has been determined upon the admitted facts and upon the construction of the statute, and upon nothing else. The language of section 31 was examined to see whether it is capable of a narrower meaning than that which has consistently been placed upon it, and every construction reasonably open upon the words was weighed before the conclusion was reached. It is not capable of such a meaning. Section 31 of Act 4 admits of no exception for the hard or the deserving case, and this Court possesses no dispensing power by which to create one. Sympathy is not a principle of construction. The equity of a particular case, however strong, furnishes no warrant for departing from the words Parliament has used or from the construction which the Federal Court has authoritatively placed upon them. To read the section as yielding here is to read it as yielding everywhere: a construction relaxed to relieve one family is a construction relaxed for every family that comes after, and what would thereby be unsettled is the assured, no-fault protection upon which families in precisely the Plaintiffs' position depend. The sympathy which the circumstances of the Plaintiffs command is accordingly complete and unqualified, and it has formed no part of the answer which the law returns. Any reconsideration of the balance struck by the statutory settlement is a matter for Parliament, and the authoritative construction of section 31 a matter for the Federal Court; neither lies within the province of a court of first instance. Three matters remain. First, the dismissal of this action is no reflection upon the sincerity of the Plaintiffs' grievance or upon the loss which gave rise to it. It is the consequence, faithfully applied, of a law which this Court did not make and is bound to obey. Secondly, the claim lodged under the scheme stands untouched by this decision, and it is right that its character be understood. Contributions were made in respect of the deceased under the Act, and deductions for that purpose were taken from the wages he earned. What his parents now claim is therefore no gratuity. It is the return upon a bargain to which their son was himself a contributor, payable because he was an insured person and because he died at his work, and payable without their having to prove anything against anyone. Its determination is for the Social Security Organisation according to the Act, nothing in these Grounds bears upon it, and the Court expresses no view upon it beyond the hope that it will be attended to without delay. Thirdly, nothing said in this Final Word qualifies the reasons already given, and the order made as to costs rests upon the considerations set out at paragraph [82] and upon no other. [87] The Plaintiffs leave this Court without the remedy they sought. They do not leave it without its respect, and their son does not leave it unnamed or lightly weighed. He was twenty-two years of age. On 09.02.2022 he went to his work, and he did not come home. His parents were entitled to bring that death before a court and to be heard upon it, and they have been heard. This Court cannot give them what they came for. It can give them the reasons why, stated plainly and without evasion, and it can record that the death of their son was neither unnoticed here nor lightly passed over. That much lies within its power, and it is done. Dated : 27 July 2026 (YA Dato' Sri Raja Segaran A/L S. Krishnan) (Judicial Commisioner) High Court Of Malaya Malacca High Court (MELAKA) Lawyer For Plaintiff : Encik Abdul Razak bin Abu Bakar Tetuan Abdul Razak & Partners Peguambela dan Peguamcara No.18C (3rd Floor) Jalan Tengku Ampuan Zabadah K9/K Seksyen 9,40100 Shah Alam, Selangor. Lawyer For Defendant : Encik Jaspal Singh Gill Tetuan Sekar Gill & C. Suren Peguambela dan Peguamcara No. 507, Jalan Melaka Raya 12, Taman Melaka Raya 12, Taman Melaka Raya, 75000 Melaka.