Tag Archives: Malaysia

Politics

The infamous BTN

1 Comment

The Biro Tata Negara (BTN) or in English, the National Civics Bureau, issue is something that almost everyone has always known about but rarely dared to speak out about. But once the cat’s out of the bag and the taboo of not talking about has been broken, there’s no shortage of people condemning it with their every breath. I guess I’m no different. In case there are any non-Malaysians reading this who have no idea what I’m talking about, it refers to a government agency run by the Prime Minister’s department that runs courses with the ostensible aim of promoting patriotism amongst Malaysians.

To that effect, it runs a series of courses for which attendance is obligatory for everyone wishing to qualify for a government job. However, many Malaysians have complained that the courses actually promote racism and seek to segregate the different ethnic groups that comprise the country’s citizens. The Malays in particular are consistently taught that they are special and hold a superior position with regards to the other ethnic groups while Chinese and Indian participants are taught that their Malaysian citizenship is not a right but rather a privilege for which they must be forever thankful to the Malays.

I’ve never attended one of these courses myself but I heard some very shocking anecdotes recounted by a friend of my wife about the course she was forced to take only a few years ago. This was part of a process that she had to go through to be hired as a public school teacher. I recall that the lecturer was described as being extremely provocative, to the point of shouting at participants even if that meant driving them into a rage or to tears. The Malay participants were constantly harangued with the question, “Are you Malaysians? Yes or no?” When they inevitably replied “Yes”, he would reply, “No, you are Bumiputera!”

This refers to the special classification assigned to ethnic groups recognized as being indigenous to the country, of which the Malays are by far the largest group, and hence accorded special privileges and rights under the national constitution. It goes without saying that this is resented not only by the ethnic groups not included under the bumiputera classification but also by more enlightened bumiputera who believe that such special privileges are a slur on their abilities.

Anyway the most interesting part about the experience that was related to me was towards the end of the course. One of the participants, a male Indian, was seen to be becoming more and more agitated as the lecturer spoke and looked like he was ready to start a fight then and there. The lecturer ignored him and just kept going. However, after he ended his talk, the lecturer took the time to take the Indian guy to one side to calm him down and told him not to take it too seriously and that he was just a guy doing his job. I honestly don’t know if that’s something to laugh or cry over.

News & Politics, Politics

Thoughts on the 2010 Malaysian Budget

Leave a comment

Before I go into my views on the budget, I’d like to express my disappointment with the poor quality of the discourse that I’ve read on the topic over on the LYN forums. Most people over there, including at least one moderator, seem to be basing their evaluation of it entirely on how it benefits or harms them personally, completely discounting its effects on a wider scale. While this is somewhat predictable, I’ve also known LYN to offer intelligent and knowledgeable commentary on important issues in the past which is why this particular disappointment is so galling.

To me the most interesting aspect of the new budget is the re-introduction of the property gains tax. The original announcement of a 30% tax on gains made from the disposal of a property purchased within the first two years of acquisition  and dropping down in subsequent years seemed bold and promising to me. Since I’ve long been an advocate of capital gains taxes in Malaysia, I felt that this was overdue even though as someone with someone with significant investments in REITs, this would personally hurt me. I see today however that this has been toned down to a mere 5% tax regardless of length of tenure, which seems pitiful to me.

The other major move that most people are talking about is imposing a RM50 service charge on each credit card issued. Currently, it’s not clear whether this is going to take the form of an explicit tax or a mandatory minimum annual fee but the intent is clearly to rein in the preposterous pace of credit cards issuings in the country. Ordinarily, I abhor government-led social engineering even when I agree with the intent, but in this case I believe that the intervention is mild enough to give it a pass. However, I doubt that this will have any major effect as it will be easy enough for the banks to issue rebates to offset the cost.

The various tax breaks including the increase of personal relief from income tax are obviously designed to win some popularity with the voting public but was it really necessary to also throw in a 1% decrease in the tax rate for the highest income bracket? This looks like a particularly unwise move when the government deficit is expected to rise to record levels. Even if the government insisted on keeping the fiscal taps open for stimulus purposes, it would have a better idea to spend the money on a negative income tax on the poorest Malaysians rather than giving a tax break to the richest. A negative tax would effectively be a subsidy for cheap Malaysian labour which should also help to reduce the incentive for employers to hire foreign labour which so many Malaysians seem to be upset about.

Finally, I think that completely opening the financial sector to foreign equity is a great move. In fact, to those who argue that reducing the top rate of income tax would be useful in attracting top tier talent to the country, I’d argue that levelling the playing field is a far greater incentive. It would be even better if the government had the political capital to do away with silly NEP quotas and restrictions, but this is still a good start.

Overall, I favor an economic policy that concentrates on building the fundamentals for consistent and reliable growth rather than trying to jump start the economy for quick spurts of growth. For this reason, I disagree with the tax exemptions for the Iskandar project and believe that it will only open the door to more cronyism and corruption. A good budget should be fiscally responsible and while I agree that turning the taps completely off at this time would be unwise, I believe that the government has not made enough of a commitment to reduce the deficit in the future and I fear that this could lead to increased inflation expectations in the future.

Politics

Malaysian libertarian lambasts Western environmentalists

Leave a comment

I’m one of the (probably) few Malaysians who’s actually signed up for and read Wan Saiful Wan Jan’s Waubebas.org site on a regular basis. It’s the official website for the Malaysian Think Tank which seems to be a group of Ayn Rand-inspired Malaysian libertarians. I have no idea how big or how influential they are, but apparently Datuk Zaid Ibrahim is a member of their advisory board, so it’s seems like a serious operation.

I pretty much agree with most of the editorials their director general writes, but I take issue with this one that appeared on The Malaysian Insider. Now, I’m a libertarian and I do admit to generally being a skeptic on environmental issues. In particular, I believe that the movement relies too much on general feel-good and not enough on rational cost-benefit analysis. On the issue of global warming, I now believe that a preponderance of scientific evidence indicates the phenomenon is real and is indeed man-made. The only debate is how much damage it would cause, how much it would cost to mitigate the effects and whether that exchange is ultimately worth it.

However, what really annoys me about this particular editorial is that he falls back on the old “let’s bash the Western imperialists” clarion call when he should really know better. Granted, it may well be true that some parties that are in government in certain Western governments may have the intention of using environmental regulations as a backdoor to impose protectionist restrictions on Asian countries, but we shouldn’t allow this side issue to dominate what is ultimately a very important debate.

Wan Saiful Wan Jan implies that all local environmentalists have been brainwashed by their Western compatriots who actually do not have their best interests in mind. Why isn’t it possible that there might be Asians who genuinely want a better environment for themselves and their children, even at the cost of some economic growth? This is surely a choice that Asians must make for themselves, all the while being conscious of the arguments on both sides of the aisle. Equally galling is the implication that since the Western countries achieved their present prosperity in part by despoiling the environment, therefore Asian countries have the “right” to do the same. Why not also say that since the United States built its country on the back of slave labour, Asian countries should be free to do the same?

Make no mistake. I’m as outraged as he is when lefties scoff at the importance of economic growth even while enjoying the material fruits of that growth. But I also do not believe in growth at all costs. As Asians countries continue to industrialize and expand their economics, their people need to do some serious soul searching about the relative weights of their different priorities. It’s not just environmentalism either. There are also important debates to be had about how unequal a society they’re willing to tolerate to achieve higher growth rates, how important social mobility is to them, how much they value free time and myriad other issues.

Blaming it all on Western imperialism is just a cheap trick to short circuit the debate and achieve your objectives without having to directly address the arguments both for and against the issue. If Wan Saiful Wan Jan thinks that global warming is a hoax, then let him marshal the scientific sources to back up his claim. If he thinks that economic growth is important enough in the short-term to justify some damage to environment, let him spell out exactly how much damage he’s willing to tolerate and how much growth he thinks we can achieve in exchange. Then let the Malaysian public decide what to go for.

Politics, Religion

No need to fill in “race” for official forms in Malaysia?

1 Comment

I find the current debate about dropping the “race” column from many official government forms in Malaysia to be quite amusing. My views on the artificiality of ethnic and even nationalistic groupings are already well advertised on this blog, so I won’t go into them again. On the surface, this move is reminiscent of the French government’s official policy to never collect such details about its citizens. The basic idea is that all French nationals are alike to the government. So long as you hold French citizenship, the government doesn’t care what colour your skin is and treats everyone equally.

Of course, in our case, our minister makes it clear that race information will continue to be collected in cases where it is relevant to bumiputra special priviliges, which means that this is a blatant public relations exercise that will do nothing to change the status quo. Not that anyone expected anything more from the National Front government. But wait, if we go back to that comparison to France, you’ll find that not only does the French government not collect information about “race” from its citizens, it also doesn’t collect information about “religion”. However, as all Malaysians know, not only do our official government forms contain blank spaces to fill in your race, they also contain spaces to fill in your religion. Are we supposed to infer that while the government doesn’t care about your race except when it comes to bumiputra privileges but it does care about your religion or did the minister simply forget that Malaysian government forms also contain that entry?

To me, none of this really matters. Even in France, academics who need to study the demographics of the French population simply bypass the lack of official statistical information on race and religion simply by analyzing names instead. Given two names, say, Michèle Alliot-Marie and Rachida Dati, it’s not hard to tell who’s white and who’s not. Even though I detest the practice of classifying people into races, it’s an undeniable reality in the minds of most people and should be fought against on that level. I feel that as long as this is true, it’s more useful for the government to collect this information than to pretend that the phenomenon doesn’t exist.

One point of contention in Malaysia when it comes to bumiputra privileges is whether or not the 30% equity target for the Malays as stated in the Malaysian New Economic Policy affirmative action plan has already been reached. The government insists that the target hasn’t been reached yet so the continuing existence of the NEP is justified. However economists argue that this is only true because the government fudges its figures, in particular by using the archaic par value as opposed to market value to measure the proportion of shares held by bumiputra. It’s easy to see that by selectively collecting race information in some cases and not in others, the Malaysian government can obfuscate the true picture even more.

News & Politics, Science

Of bandwidth caps and pay as you go Internet

3 Comments

Maybe I’m easily amused, but I had fun reading through this huge troll of a thread on LYN yesterday evening. It was clearly posted from a dupe account made for the specific purpose of starting that thread, but the inspiration came from a comment by the real Fikri Saleh during an online interview with the Malaysian Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation Datuk Dr. Maximus Ongkili organized by The Star:

I am an Electrical Engineering undergraduate from the University of Melbourne, currently majoring in telecommunications. In Australia they charge you for download quotas, where the more you download, the more you will have to pay, say 100 GB @ $100 versus 20 GB @ $20, after which the speed is throttled down (slowed). By charging more for more quota, this can improve overall connection quality. The heavy downloaders can still download, but now they have to pay more. Thus we normal users do not have to put up with the network being bogged due to these heavy downloaders, because there will be fewer of them.

Regards,
Fikri Saleh

Continue reading Of bandwidth caps and pay as you go Internet →

News & Politics

Index funds again

12 Comments

I’m feeling lazy today, so here’s a cut and paste response that I posted to a question in LYN:

Can someone recommend some unit trust fund managers for KLCI INDEX fund? Is the OSK KLCI Tracker the only KLCI index fund around? I cannot believe this. Why other fund managers don’t setup an index fund? Why let OSK monopoly? I can’t even find two to compare and see which is cheaper.

Late reply, but this is something that I’ve wondered about in the past on this very forum as well. If you read a lot of general investment advice that comes out of experience in the US markets, the general consensus you should get is that most ordinary people should just buy index funds and forget about everything else. The rationale is that research has definitively demonstrated that over the long run, index funds in the aggregate outperform actively managed funds once you account for the higher costs associated with the managed funds. While it is possible for managed funds to beat the index, research has shown that it is not generally possible to predict in advance which particular managed fund will beat its benchmark index in any particular year. Research has also shown that the simple strategy of choosing the best performer of last year to invest in every year is a losing one.

Continue reading Index funds again →

Politics

BN politician compares himself to Mandela and Gandhi

1 Comment

I admit that I’ve been a bit too apathetic of late to pay much attention to Malaysian politics. This means that most of the subtleties and intricacies of what’s going on in the power struggle over the state of Perak has gone way over my head. Still, when a politician from the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition is oblivious enough to compare his struggles with those of Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, even I have to sit up and take notice. An excerpt from an article from The Star that’s looks like it should have appeared in a Malaysian version of The Onion, but sadly isn’t:

He said a person did not need to hold a post in his struggle to uphold the truth, and likened the recent struggles faced by him and his “comrades from the Barisan Nasional” to those endured by politicians like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi.

“Nelson Mandela sacrificed his freedom for 27 years in order to free South Africans from the grip of ‘apartheid.’

“Gandhi also sacrificed his life for the sake of India’s independence and so his people would be able to live without caste or religious boundaries,” he said.

Dr Zambry said however that it was lucky for him that his struggles had not caused him physical harm or loss of freedom.

“I only had to withstand the negative perceptions that Nizar and his people have created of me and the Barisan’s image.

This is a truly a wtf moment of mindblowing proportions. The Barisan Nasional, which has ruled the country uninterrupted since its independence, being cast in the role of the poor underdog. Let’s just say that some people have really thick skins.