PM says Malaysia still lagging in industrial advancement

By Shazwan Mustafa Kamal - The Malaysian Insider

PUTRAJAYA, Nov 10 — Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said today that Malaysia needs a new paradigm if it wants to catch up with developed nations in terms of industrial advancement.

He was speaking at the 12th MSC International Advisory Panel Meeting (IAP) earlier this morning.

The prime minister said a system which drives high performance at all levels of society will be put in place soon. One of these is the rolling out of an advanced national communications infrastructure which promises to connect 1.2 million households with a high speed broadband network.

“We will be rolling out an advanced national communications infrastructure by wiring up 1.2 million households and business premises with fibre-optics so that Internet subscribers can get speeds of between 10MBps (megabytes per second) to 1GBps (gigabytes per second),” explained Najib.

While acknowledging the fact that Malaysia had achieved success in the past by growing an industrial base and expanding its agricultural sector, he emphasised that more measures were needed to boost the economy and that the country can “no longer rely on what had worked for us in the past.”

The premier feels that the way forward is the New Economic Model that will successfully transform the economy into a full-fledged industrial-based one.

There are no details yet on the new model as it will only be officially launched at the end of the year. However, today Najib gave hints on what this new approach would be like.

“We have already embarked on a comprehensive reform of our capital markets as well as introduced sweeping measures to liberalise our services sector.”

He also stressed on an intimate, people-centric approach through the use of ICT, citing his 1 Malaysia website as an example of how Malaysians can interact directly with him and air their opinions or grievances.

“No economy can claim to be developed without having a significant technological component... this brings us to MSC Malaysia, an initiative which was conceived as a platform for developing world-class ICT applications and also serves as a seeding ground for Silicon Valley-type entrepreneurs,” explained Najib.

“I hope we will be able to work out a set of strategies for MSC Malaysia to be incorporated in our New Economic Model, so that we can realise our desire to be a developed high income nation by 2020.”