Is Budget 2016 for the people?
This article has earlier appeared in Beritadaily.com on 9/11/2015
We all have seen and heard of the Budget 2016 tabled by Prime Minister and Umno president Najib Razak recently. On the surface, it looks so attractive that some people may get overly excited until they look deeper into the content.
Our major concern here is, does this budget really serve its purpose? Our nation’s economy has been battered by the continuous depreciation of the ringgit. Inflation has been rising right to the top, and our people could no longer bear the rising cost of living these days.
Economically, most of us are in quite a defensive mode because we need to fight for our survival, work even harder to earn more money just so we could put some food on the table for our family.
Is this what the BN government has planned all this while? Making sure we are all tied up, frustrated and feeling helpless, so we have no more time to look at the way BN runs this nation of ours to ruins?
Let us look at what Najib and his bully boys have put in the budget for themselves, subtly taking away some while giving away a little to us.
As expected every year, the Prime Minister’s Department (PMD) took up the largest share of the budget by having RM20 billion in its mouth. If we were to look into its staffing, the PMD is the largest government ministry in the world, surpassing even those of developed nations such as Japan, South Korea, the United States, Canada, Germany and bigger nations like Russia, China and India.
After enjoying the largest ever allocations annually, have they ever provided the best ever service to the general public? To the entire population in every corner of our nation. Until today, this government’s service level to the people is still far from efficient.
The number of civil servants has also doubled over the years, giving the Malaysian government yet another dubious distinction of being the largest employer in the world.
Every year, large sums of payouts, bonuses, rewards and annual increments were made to civil servants, and now their minimum wage was increased to RM1,200. But have all these led to better levels of service to the people? Until today, it is still a 'No.'
Instead, we are treated to a spectacle of misdeeds as reported by the Auditor-General annually, like corruption, mismanagement and power abuse.
Worse still this government is already in a defensive and denial mode over a number of scandals that ripped our nation of billions of ringgit which was supposed to be channelled to meet the people’s needs.
The worst of the lot is the 1MDB fiasco, where there is a lack of sincerity to resolve the scandal but every effort is made to curb criticism of the 1MDB issue.
The BN government may say the budget has been doing something for the people by building more affordable houses. But so what?
Does every segment of the population really benefit from it? Will all the people be entitled to so-called 'affordable' units? Can all these units be built in strategic locations, in every state, every city, every township.
More importantly, would these houses be built near the workplace, schools, townships and public transport facilities to make life easier for the people?
Rising cost of living
Incidentally, what about the current property price which has been skyrocketing recently? And it is going to rise continuously because this government has no plans or measures to control the escalating property prices in the market.
Again, are all these benefiting the entire population? Even the middle-income groups could not afford a decent home for themselves and their families nowadays.
There are also no provisions in the budget for offering immediate relief to the people to cope with the rising cost of living.
Inflation has increased dramatically after the GST was imposed. People are now paying more but their incomes remain stagnant.
Despite losing control over inflation, the government has refused calls to increase the number of zero-rated consumer items, reasoning that the GST is badly needed to finance the growing civil service sector and to reduce its deficit.
To make things worse the government has even withdrawn the relief rates for taxpayers who are servicing their loans and other financial commitments, particularly the housing loans, hire purchase and insurance premiums, as well as the RM100 schooling assistance for parents with schoolgoing children on the excuse that it was only a small amount.
To the prime minister and cabinet ministers, this kind of relief could be too small for them given the fact that they are super rich, but for the middle and lower-income groups, this small amount could mean a lot especially in this time of economic uncertainties and growing inflation.
As for the disabled community, this government was also seen as still treating the disabled on a charitable basis instead of looking at their basic rights. Why only provide allowances to them when there should be allocations for infrastructure and education designed for this group?
This budget has also failed to spell out any improvement to the critical services such as public transportation to allow the people to enjoy better service and travel economically. Cheaper transport would go a long way to ease the burden of people who travel for work and business daily.
If you observe the roads and highways today, you will see almost everyone in this land owning a vehicle to travel daily.Traffic congestions have become the norm and so does environmental pollution as a result of too many vehicles on the road.
So, at the end of the day, the livelihood and well-being of our people remain stagnant; the budget does not really help anyone to ease their financial burden. The current economic uncertainties and inflation continue to haunt the population with higher costs.
WH Cheng is director of Inter-Research And Studies (IRAS)
