Budget 2015 is certainly people-friendly, but it falls short in responding to economic and financial imperatives.
By Ramon Navaratnam
Now that our PM has delivered a truly people-friendly budget, let’s give him a big thank you for all the goodies. But let’s also ask ourselves how Budget 2015 could have been better. After all, it’s always good to review, revise and improve. This applies to ourselves as individuals and should apply to us as a nation.
Firstly the relationship between the People’s Budget and the Capital Budget could have been more balanced. The budget tended to be more populist in its stance and less concerned with responding strenuously to the economic and financial imperatives that the PM himself mentioned in his speech.
There was little treatment of how to deal with the long term structural issues—how to reduce capital outflows, how to counter the brain drain, and what to do to promote meritocracy and raise international competitiveness to higher levels. Neither did we hear much about how the government proposes to address some of the obvious causes of rising inflation, which are corruption, wastage in expenditure, protectionism, negotiated tenders and sheer inefficiencies in many parts of our economy.
The budget addressed the short term problems quite well, but the structural and harder challenges received less attention.
Secondly, although we understand that the short-term people’s budget and the longer term capital budget have some “symbiotic relationship”, we would like the government to give higher priority to efforts that would ensure good governance and the socio-economic sustainability of our system of government.
This critical issue of continued sustainability for the future well-being of our country and our people was recently admirably highlighted by the Sultan of Perak. We could certainly do much better by taking heed of his sound advice.
Thirdly, the seven main strategies mentioned in the budget speech are positive, useful and welcome. But it would be better at this advanced stage of our national development to focus much more on a Malaysian agenda that has no racial basis.
Let’s formulate our socio-economic planning and budgets on the basis of needs and not race or religion. Please unite and don’t divide Malaysians. After all, we are all God’s children and living in One Malaysia.
Let’s increasingly concentrate on just universal human values rather than narrow race and religious parochialism in our policies and implementation of them.
What we need in our budgets is inclusiveness, not exclusiveness. We need to promote greater national unity instead of creating any sense of disunity or even perceived feelings of alienation.
Finally, I believe that Budget 2015 was generally well received by the rakyat because it contains a lot of perks for them. However, let’s keep our socio-economic and political policies focused more on long term sustainability and continuing and greater peace and progress for all Malaysians, please.
Tan Sri Ramon Navaratnam, a former deputy secretary-general of the Finance Ministry, now heads the ASLI Center of Public Policy Studies.
Now that our PM has delivered a truly people-friendly budget, let’s give him a big thank you for all the goodies. But let’s also ask ourselves how Budget 2015 could have been better. After all, it’s always good to review, revise and improve. This applies to ourselves as individuals and should apply to us as a nation.
Firstly the relationship between the People’s Budget and the Capital Budget could have been more balanced. The budget tended to be more populist in its stance and less concerned with responding strenuously to the economic and financial imperatives that the PM himself mentioned in his speech.
There was little treatment of how to deal with the long term structural issues—how to reduce capital outflows, how to counter the brain drain, and what to do to promote meritocracy and raise international competitiveness to higher levels. Neither did we hear much about how the government proposes to address some of the obvious causes of rising inflation, which are corruption, wastage in expenditure, protectionism, negotiated tenders and sheer inefficiencies in many parts of our economy.
The budget addressed the short term problems quite well, but the structural and harder challenges received less attention.
Secondly, although we understand that the short-term people’s budget and the longer term capital budget have some “symbiotic relationship”, we would like the government to give higher priority to efforts that would ensure good governance and the socio-economic sustainability of our system of government.
This critical issue of continued sustainability for the future well-being of our country and our people was recently admirably highlighted by the Sultan of Perak. We could certainly do much better by taking heed of his sound advice.
Thirdly, the seven main strategies mentioned in the budget speech are positive, useful and welcome. But it would be better at this advanced stage of our national development to focus much more on a Malaysian agenda that has no racial basis.
Let’s formulate our socio-economic planning and budgets on the basis of needs and not race or religion. Please unite and don’t divide Malaysians. After all, we are all God’s children and living in One Malaysia.
Let’s increasingly concentrate on just universal human values rather than narrow race and religious parochialism in our policies and implementation of them.
What we need in our budgets is inclusiveness, not exclusiveness. We need to promote greater national unity instead of creating any sense of disunity or even perceived feelings of alienation.
Finally, I believe that Budget 2015 was generally well received by the rakyat because it contains a lot of perks for them. However, let’s keep our socio-economic and political policies focused more on long term sustainability and continuing and greater peace and progress for all Malaysians, please.
Tan Sri Ramon Navaratnam, a former deputy secretary-general of the Finance Ministry, now heads the ASLI Center of Public Policy Studies.
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