MAHATHIR, DOCTORATE OF ECONOMIC IDIOT-LOGY

By : AARON MARK MOJILIP

AS I WAS reading on an article online about the statement of our former Prime Minister Tun Mahathir towards our problems on illegal immigrants in our country, I was devastated as to why our constitution rights are far biased towards one particular race.

One could read along the lines of article no. 160 in saying that “any Muslim who practices the Malay culture and speaks the Malay language as well as adheres to Malay customs is a Malay”.

If I were to give a 17 year old high school kid to read this, he would know at first glance that this is a stupid right. Now who is anybody to give any rights as how one should live to be categorized as belonging to one race and further more to give them a piece of cake (NEP) just by associating yourself to one. That is just so stupid to think of and not to mention laughable.

Now given this stupid rights, Mahathir reiterated that these ‘New Malays’ shouldn’t be seen as a problem but instead it enforces his fancy vision of achieving a sound economy comes 2020.

He furthered stated that he needed at least 70 million people to support and sustain a domestic market for Malaysian produced goods and services. In other words, you need more bees to enter our already full colony and work like busy bees to get honey and sustain the existence of the colony.

Now economic fundamentalist will discredit Mahathir’s statement as being biased to only one solution. Just look at China as being the biggest population in the world and only recently that it open its economy to the outside world that the country is now booming.

For this very reason, I came in enlightenment as to finding the truth of this ordeal. I decided to look into Australia as my basis of argument simply because of the close proximity when it comes to population size.

If we look at the population in Australia in 2005, the population was at 20.39 million as opposed to Malaysia which was 26.10 million during the same period.

If we were to look at the annual growth of Australia during that period we could see that GDP per capita (or the value of all final goods and services produce in a given year) of that nation was USD 32,873.74 per capita (ranked at 13 in the world) which was 170 % more than Malaysia at $12,155.27 per capita, ranked at only 60 in a global ranking.

If we were to look in Dollar form Australia during that year has a GDP valued at USD 674.6 billion as compared to Malaysia of only half of that which valued at USD 313.2 billion.

The World Bank categorizes Australia as High Income earners compared to Malaysia as only Upper Middle Income Earners. What is interesting when I had a look at the statistics, I found out that R&D spending and technological achievement is far superior to those of Malaysia. (Source World Bank).

Being a real skeptic myself, the notion of growth within a domestic economy as Mahathir have stated cannot be dependent on population growth alone but through various means.

Yes population comes in handy if we are talking about labour supply but what use is it if we keep increasing a population in an economy that is not “skilled” labour driven.

Some quarters might argue that in agriculture and construction where labour is most needed is relatively true, but we can see for ourselves that a lot of migrants have taken jobs and businesses in sectors which does not require any special skill thus taking the potential livelihood of locals to do business like sundry shops, fish market and even private transports. How and why is government not stepping in regulating and ensuring that this problem does not affect on their own people.

Real economic development means among other things, having a stable government with a firm rule of law (independent to the government) and a favourable monitory and fiscal policies that attracts good business efficiency that only helps to bring foreign direct investments coming in to the country.

Transfer of technologies and the “know how’s” are important as we try to compete with advance economies and this includes a big effort in government investing in education like math and science. Lastly and certainly important, we need governments to be fair in terms of income distribution in a pluralistic society like ours.

Just like Singapore did when Lee Kwan Yew once ruled, said that he can’t afford to have racial (this also includes economic) disunity among his people, instead of focusing on a cohesive means to unite his nation. He unlike Mahathir is true to his words judging from what is happening now.

They are a great nation with a sound economy and with no resources like us, they could thrive in many sectors like shipping and financing to name a few.

True Malaysia need this, we need this, our children need this. We cry to our leaders, stop..enough is enough…we need the truth…and not your version of the truth.