Pak Lah's Laments ...

When I glanced at today' page 1 report in the NST, I was surprised at the first paragraph (in Bold!) Little seeems to be happening.Contracts are drying up. Election promises have been put on the backburner.

This was preceded by the headline in the NST, PM: I'm aware ... with the byline By Brendan Pereira.

Yes, "surprised" because it is more than a catchy summary of the state of affairs of the nation, and also gives an initial impression that the nation's CEO is being brutally Frank&Honest upfront about the failures to deliver after 18 months in office as Prime Minister.

But dismay came soon after reading our Prime Minister's speech at the Harvard Club dinner the night before as the earlier impression of recognition of the core problems did not come from Pak Lah, just him saying these were the perceptions of certain quarters but that the PM insisted that the realities showed otherwise!

I blame the reporter for misleading the readers with such a "lead" paragraph for it's not clear about the attribution (Who spoke those lines?). To me coming from a senior journalist, it's not only misleading but also irresponsible. It did not reflect the heart of the matter, or what were the core points of the PM's speech to a select audience of the Malaysian community. Indeed, the second and third paras of the same report read thus:

Datuk Seri Abdullah set the record straight on these sentiments in arguably one of his most important speeches since becoming Prime Minister of Malaysia in November 2003.

He conceded that malaise and inertia continued to be a problem in certain sectors, and the pace of reform slow. But the situation was not as gloomy as painted by the doomsayers, saying that significant progress had been achieved over 18 months and there was more to come.

Contrast this with the coverage by other dailies like The Star and theSun, which was straight forward reporting without any ambiguity. What they did was to highlight the key issues that the PM had identified as three bad habits Malaysia must rid itself of in targeting at attaining First World status, namely:

the addictions to
* Cheap foreign labour;
* Subsidies; and
* Rent-seeking (which The Star summarised as "Favours and connections").

The first two points are easily understood; on the third point, Pah Lah's speech contained a reference to 'WE WOULD RATHER GO FOR “KNOW-WHO” THAN “KNOW-HOW”'.
The Star elaborated on the definition of Rent-seeking as "the expenditure of resources in order to bring about an uncompensated transfer of goods or services from another person or persons to one's self as the result of a "favourable" decision on some public policy. The term seems to have been coined by American economist Gordon Tullock.)

But the citizenry know the main causes, including those three addictions, that ail the country. What they had seen the past 1-1/2 years is that not much progress has been achieved in eradicating these bad habits.

Witness what happened immediately after the amnesty given to the Indonesian illegal workers who went back to their homeland, and the majority failed to show up on a regularised basis in Malaysia. The government decided to source 100,000 workers on a fast track from Pakistan alone, and other numbers from India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, etc. So this administration did not look beyond the immediate crisis faced by Malaysia -- i.e. a shoratge of workers, mainly in the construction and plantation sectors. Then why publicise the problem?

By importing workers from Pakistan, Malaysia is perpetuating the "addiction" to cheap labour. So where is the confluence of words and deeds, Mr Prime Minister?