Because domestic oil prices are kept artificially low by government subsidies, rising oil prices mean the Malaysian Government has to pay out more in the form of these subsidies.
If we get rid of subsidies, as we well ought to (but gradually, so as not to send shock waves throughout the economy), well, we can use that money to build more:
• schools, colleges and universities (free education to PhD level for all who qualify, regardless of ethnicity or religion or anak siapa/Dato' mana). A poor education system, of which the BN government has no intention of repairing, has made, and will continue to make Malaysia uncompetitive. Malaysia has lost the golden years when both India and China were closed economies, and were therefore not competitors, by not optimising its human resource, who were either underutilised or whose skills were taken up by competitive economies, like Singapore, Canada and Australia, because of its backward-looking, ethnocentric 'bumiputra policy';
• clinics, hospitals (do you know Malaysia has not a single dental hospital?);
• really decent internet infrastructure. Aren't you fed-up with TM's "best effort" nonsense? How about UniFi at ten times the speed and one tenth the cost?;
• really decent public transport systems (more integrated stations with buildings like Kerinchi and UOA Bangsar), more stations in Klang Valley, link Klang with Seremban via Teluk Panglima Garang, KLIA and Enstek via ERL; build 400 km/h MagLev system from Seremban to Woodlands in Singapore; revive Putrajaya LRT system, something PutraJaya Holdings CEO Azlan Abdul Karim has been clamouring for for years (but nobody was listening); a decent railway system for Kota Kinabalu and Sabah;
• make it a statutory requirement that all Government buildings be GBI-certified. There is no reason why we should not deserve or enjoy a better Quality of Living.
OR, we can
• keep an already bloated civil service that is inefficient, corrupt and wasteful afloat. We have not even begun to calculate the liabilities due to these morons for their pensions when they do retire. There appears to be no way to pay those bills. We have past peak oil, and will run out of oil by or before 2018. Oil money used to pay for all the wastage for the past 30 years. Mahathir was no genius. Any idiot can spend oil money, just ask any Arab in Saudi or the UAE...
• and keep spending on dubious projects (submarines that can't dive comes to mind) to feed fat cat political proxies and cronies. A substantial portion of the nation's wealth has been stolen by BN politicians, and currently resides overseas in Private Bank accounts. Corruption is rife, and now the cost of corruption is finally starting to show. Now the poor pay directly for BN's blatant looting.
It all depends on who you vote for at the next General Election, you see.
"The world suffers a lot. Not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people" - Napoleon Bonaparte
In the long term, the Ringgit will be substantially weaker than what it is today, and there will be no Federal Reserve, or EU to bail them out when Malaysian Government debt will be treated as trash, in as much as Greek Sovereign debt is treated today.
Azlan Adnan
Founder
Green Alliance of Malaysia
with inspirational input from Arul Inthirarajah and many thanks to Amirah Ameer Ali for the quotation by Napoleon.
Copyright 2003-2010 Azlan Adnan Legal Notice
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