Najib's 2013 Budget

PM Najib might as well be the character of Prince George in the above video clip. No wonder the BN MPs do not want to debate his 2013 Budget. 

Before we speak of the Budget….PM Najib recently spoke eloquently about the perils of corruption. Spoken philosophically that is. Who are his strategists? Are they from Mars or what? Asking poor Najib to speak on a particular subject which authenticity he himself does not believe and can’t be imagined that he does. Just like his 2013 budget, his speech on corruption must be hatched in one of the small vaulted rooms at the PM’s office by a group of sandwich-eating locked out consultants.  The one variety diet must have driven these people to hallucinate!

What Najib did can be likened to Hugh Hefner asking his playboy bunnies to be fully clothed when doing photo-shoots. It’s also like Larry Flint asking his hustler beauties to wear nun’s clothes for that poplar magazine.

We will write about Najib’s commitment about corruption at another time. But I can’t resist mentioning about what PM Najib just did though, when Dr Mahathir himself has declared that this government is corrupt from top to bottom. Or knowing that Daim Zainudin lamented about the impossibility of combating corruption because money has defied the laws of gravity by going up right to number 1!

Let’s get back to Najib’s 2013 Budget. BN MPs spent more time debating Anwar’s Budget that their president’. Najib refers to Anwar and the PM in waiting. So the BN is actually acknowledging that PR can be the next government. Anwar is indeed the next PM then.

Silly things in the Budget.

Why don’t the BN MPs debate about their own Budget? Because it contains a lot of silly things. How would Najib implement his last minute add-ins? The reduced travel fares meant for senior citizens and those who earn RM 2000 or less pcm? How will Najib’s people implement that? Commuters will have to carry their pay slips when travelling on buses, trains and airplanes and have them shown to conductors? Or some people will then supply buses with card readers who can read mykads to verify the holders’ income? Or building affordable homes which not many people can actually afford because they earn RM 3000 or less a month? The RM1.5 billion allocation – was it meant only for PR1M?

Raising disposable income.

Look at how Najib and Anwar Ibrahim plan to make disposable income. Najib gives out all the goodies in preparation to introduce GST if BN wins the election. That seems to be his solution to increase revenue now that the present tax base has been reduced. Anwar Ibrahim plans to raise disposable income through fiscal reform measures such as cutting the triple import taxes on foreign-made cars, abolishment of tolls and waiver of student loans. Anwar proposed to raise disposable income through measures that are aimed at plugging leakages that arise as a result of inefficiencies and corruption.

The government, which has run a budget deficit every year since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, sees the deficit shrinking on better tax collection and slightly higher economic growth of 4.5-5.5 per cent in 2013 from 4.5-5 per cent this year. And what does better tax collection mean? Where will the increase revenue come from?  State oil giant PETRONAS contributes up to 45 per cent of the government’s revenues. What will happen when earnings from PETRONAS decline?

The government says it wants to introduce a goods and services tax to widen the revenue base in a country where only about 10 per cent of the workforce pays income taxes and to cut the fuel subsidies that are among Asia’s highest. Najib said more time is needed to prepare the public for such unpopular steps.

Educating Malaysia.

In the education sector, an interesting area that raises many eyebrows and set the Malaysian tongues wagging was the allocation of a whopping RM1.2 billion for pre-school education. What has Rosmah Mansor done to deserve RM 111 million? Or what has the Permata Negara programme done and achieved?  What it has done is to suck up taxpayers money to the tune of RM2 billion thus far. It’s the black hole in Najib’s budget. And nobody knows how the money was being used. Does the missus’s project require such huge taxpayers’ money considering most of the pre-schools are fees-based and privately-owned?

The recent Times Ranking of Universities has revealed the problem we have. Where do we get a trained workforce to propel the enation to the high income economy with USD15, 000 per-capita-income? We have so many universities producing quantity but not quality. With so many more MCE standard workers, how do we push up our productivity boundaries?  Our traditional plantation sector requires 500,000 foreign workers. It seems our economy is attracting the low end labor force which will certainly frustrate our lofty aims of becoming  a high income economy by 2020.

We have plenty of low-paying jobs that Malaysians shun but are attractive to foreigners, so we have 3 million of them. What does their presence do? They drive down wages. Foreigners set our salary/wage levels. 40% of our people are only as rich or poor as these foreigners! We have become an attractive country to jobless Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Filipinos and Burmese. They would all want to vote for UMNO/BN/Najib if they could, and some can.

Economic Transformation.

What has happened to our New Economic Model? It has become quiet since. It showed some promise with participation from stellar thinkers such as Danny Quah from LSE. Since then, the only spokesman for the NEM seems to be Idris Jala.  Najib has since backtracked from the NEM and shown little political appetite to implement the critical policies which will lead to improvements and greater competitiveness in our economy.

As I have said, his market driven affirmation is just wine in a new bottle. It’s the same policy begun by Mahathir to pick  and choose who shall become rich. The recent spate of privatization projects have also not seen any political will on the part of the Government to implement open, transparent and competitive tenders. That includes the RM628-million construction of Malaysia's largest exhibition and convention Centre, the development of the 3,000 acres of prime land in Sungai Buloh as well as the proposed major redevelopment of the old Sungai Besi airport into the KL Financial Centre. Even the highly anticipated RM46 (?) billion Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) project for the Klang Valley looks all but awarded to a Gamuda-MMC consortium without any open competitive tenders.

Najib’s pompous and talk-big notion of the era where “the government knows best” is over is only that- much thunder but little rain. His government crowds out private investments by directly awarding mega-projects to government-linked entities such as the Sg Buloh land to an Employee Provident Fund joint venture with the Government or the Sg Besi airport redevelopment to the 1Malaysia Development Fund.

So, our Ministers and herd-instinct variety of BN MPs continue to indulge in their daydream of glory and success, while our neighbors will steadily and consistently improve their economies beyond our reach.