BN dares Pakatan to show Penang master plan

That’s better than reacting to critics, say Gerakan and Umno men.

GEORGE TOWN: Barisan Nasional has challenged the Penang government to come up with a master plan that shows how Pakatan Rakyat would develop the state in the next five years.

The unveiling of such a plan would provide the public with a better means of judging Pakatan Rakyat’s fitness to continue governing the state than Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng’s display of animosity against critics, said Gerakan vice-chairman Wong Mun Hoe.

“Lim has invoked a climate of fear and uncertainty,” he told FMT. “If one speaks out, one is labelled as a BN agent or a fraud.

“How can a government function if its role is only to silence critics?”

Penang Umno Youth chief Sheikh Hussein Mydin agreed, saying Penang needed a visionary as a chief minister, not someone constantly reacting against critics.

“I think that DAP under Lim is forever having an opposition mindset,” he said. “They do not know how to govern. They only know how to argue and how to threaten people.”

Neither Wong nor Sheikh Hussein mentioned Lim’s announcement last Friday that his administration would unveil this January a development master plan to be called Penang Paradigm.

Wong alleged that the Pakatan government had wasted nearly five years accusing the previous administration of mismanagement without giving the public a fair idea of how it would develop the state.

Since 2008, he said, the state had not formulated a single comprehensive development plan that would cover industrialisation, employment, social justice and environmental concerns.

In the meantime, he added, the average citizen was struggling to cope with rising living costs.

“If you were to speak to the average person,” he said, “he would complain that he did not vote out BN only to see a clone of the previous coalition take over. The ground is starting to grow uneasy.”

Wong also accused Lim of ignoring signs of a global recession.

“What is the state policy in the event of a global economic meltdown since more than half of the state’s macro-economic activities are dependent on what happens outside of the country?”

Last Friday, when tabling Penang’s 2013 budget, Lim told the state assembly that the Penang Paradigm would be an improvement over the Greater Penang Transformation Plan that the state had discussed with the Federal Government.

“We cooperated with the Federal Government’s Northern Corridor Implementation Authority to come up with the Greater Penang Transformation Plan and had meetings with them between September and November last year,” he said.

“However, there has been no news about the report, which should have been disclosed to the public in March this year.

“We are sincere in working with the Federal Government so that the plan will work out well, but we cannot just sit still and wait.”