Ask what we and our fellowmen can do

The economic Transformation Plan is a radical agenda. The problem is, it wasn't delivered by the PM- the main driver. What is meant to become an energising agenda, turned out to be dull and average. Those familiar with freshmen's presentations will see similarities. It's just a cum laude delivery.

Over the next 10 years we will be spending 1.44 trillion. 60% will come from the private sector in the form of private investments. 40% from the government. Indirectly through the GLCs(32%) and directly from the government(8%). We need to spend this amount to get to a targeted income of 1.77 trillion. By which time, our income per capita is expected to be in the region of USD15-20 thousand.

The key word here is we are going to spend. The people who wrote the ETP didn't say anything about targeting for a balanced budget. Because we have been fed with this idea that budget deficits are ok if money is used for development purposes. But where are the development projects that we can say and judge as being for national interests? We fear that deficit budgets are fast becoming justification for awarding public money for private interests.

Budget deficits can also be symptoms of financial imprudence and financial indiscipline. Public money is being spent by the government of the day. No one spends our money better than we ourselves can. The missing link is, even though it's OUR money, we don't have a say about how we are going to spend it.

Here is what I think. When the PM came into office he declared that the era of government knows best is over.

I thought that meant the era of a bossing around government, of government crowding out entrepreneurship is over. Yet we haven't seen flesh put onto the bones. Big government is resurfacing in the form of partnership with the big market players.

Look carefully at the various EPPs and BOs- you will come away thinking these are plans culled from business plans by the very companies mentioned. These are plans by big companies who have been identified and writings about business projects already spoken for.

In other words, what the PM declared has turned out to be largely untrue. The ETP and all the other acronyms are political gadgetry signalling the coming of an era of even bigger government.

At this point in time, we seem to can't do anything. The government will de-sensitise itself and will mute itself against criticisms. It will just carry on. The rapaciousness by which corporate players swooped in to grab the spoils is astonishing. The MMC group for example, headed by Syed Mokhtar Bukhari who has his fingers in almost every business in Malaysia is another example to show what the ETP actually is. It's a license for big corporate players to raid our country. it brings new meaning to the term rapaciousness. From now on we will syed bukhari the economy or we will Gamuda the economy. We will YTL the economy, we will Berjaya the economy, we will MRCB the economy. We may even later privatise the whole business of government. This is the meaning of making the private sector as engine for our ETP.

How can we the rakyat do anything about it? I was listening to the speech given by David Cameron at the Conservative Party Convention the other day. I am sure many others did too. One passage in the speech that caught my attention was this:-

The state of our nation is not just determined by the government and those who run it. It is determined by millions of individual actions – by what each of us do and what we choose not to do.

In my opinion, the present predicament that we face is the result of what many of us choose NOT to do. We have not kicked out or we have not given the PM the reason to kick out the purveyors of the idea of bigger government. We have not expressed our disgust directly to the leader of this country that this country is on the verge of mismanagement. We have not expressed our disgust and anger that this country is not a private company run at will and as they please by profiteers and privateers.

In another remarkable passage, David Cameron said:-

citizenship isn't a transaction in which you put your taxes in and get your services out. It's a relationship – you're part of something bigger than you, and it matters what you think and feel and do. So to get out of the mess we're in, changing the government is not enough. We need to change the way we think about ourselves, and our role in society.

courtesy of Sakmongkol47